The Making of the Sympathetic Imagination

The Making of the Sympathetic Imagination PDF Author: Roman Alexander Barton
Publisher: de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110624014
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book Here

Book Description
How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result, the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy. Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its literary and moral potential.

The Making of the Sympathetic Imagination

The Making of the Sympathetic Imagination PDF Author: Roman Alexander Barton
Publisher: de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110624014
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book Here

Book Description
How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result, the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy. Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its literary and moral potential.

The Making of the Hawthorne Subject

The Making of the Hawthorne Subject PDF Author: Alison Easton
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826210401
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nearly all critics of Hawthorne have ignored this element of development, thus missing the complex evolution of the subject and the revealing intertextual play of meaning that is evident in everything Hawthorne wrote during this period.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

The Theory of Moral Sentiments PDF Author: Adam Smith (économiste)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 636

Get Book Here

Book Description


Writing Wrongs

Writing Wrongs PDF Author: Pramod K. Nayar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317809084
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the ‘cultural apparatus’ of Human Rights in India today. It unravels discourses of victimhood, oppression, suffering and witnessing through a study of autobiographies, memoirs, reportage and media coverage, and documentaries. Moving across multiple media and genres for their representations of Dalits, riot victims, prisoners, abused and abandoned women and children, examining the formal properties of victim texts for their documentation of trauma, and analyzing the role of the sympathetic imagination, Writing Wrongs inaugurates a whole new field in literary–cultural studies by focusing on the narratives that build the culture of Human Rights. It argues for taking this cultural apparatus as essential to the political and legal dimensions of Human Rights. The book emphasizes the need for an ethical turn to literary–cultural studies and a cultural turn to Human Rights studies, arguing that a public culture of Human Rights has a key role to play in revitalizing civil society and its institutions. It will be of interest to Human Rights scholars and activists, and those in political science, sociology, literary and cultural studies, narrative theory and psychology.

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy PDF Author: Alex Eric Hernandez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192585762
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
The 'rise of the middle class' in the eighteenth century has long been taken to usher in a prosaic age synonymous with the death of tragedy, an age in which the sheer ordinariness of bourgeois life was both antithetical and inured to the tragic. But the period's literature tells a very different story. Re-assembling a body of print and performance concerned with the misfortunes of the middling sort, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy argues that these works imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, an 'ordinary suffering' proper to ordinary life, divested of the sorts of meanings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it. Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the admirable, this 'bourgeois and domestic tragedy' treated the pain of common people with dignity and seriousness, meditating upon a suffering that was homely, familiar, entangled in the nascent values of capitalism, yet no less haunted by God. Hence, where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, misfiring emotion, and the absence of an idealized tragicness in the genre, this volume sees instead a sustained engagement in the emotional processes and representational techniques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. By attending closely to this long neglected subject, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy turns the critical account of eighteenth-century tragedy on its head. It reads the genre's emergence in the period as a vigorous cultural conversation on whose life--and whose way of life--is grievable, as well as how mourning might be performed

Handbook of British Romanticism

Handbook of British Romanticism PDF Author: Ralf Haekel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110393409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 770

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Handbook of British Romanticism is a state of the art investigation of Romantic literature and theory, a field that probably changed more quickly and more fundamentally than any other traditional era in literary studies. Since the early 1980s, Romantic studies has widened its scope significantly: The canon has been expanded, hitherto ignored genres have been investigated and new topics of research explored. After these profound changes, intensified by the general crisis of literary theory since the turn of the millennium, traditional concepts such as subjectivity, imagination and the creative genius have lost their status as paradigms defining Romanticism. The handbook will feature discussions of key concepts such as history, class, gender, science and the use of media as well as a thorough account of the most central literary genres around the turn of the 19th century. The focus of the book, however, will lie on a discussion of key literary texts in the light of the most recent theoretical developments. Thus, the Handbook of British Romanticism will provide students with an introduction to Romantic literature in general and literary scholars with a discussion of innovative and groundbreaking theoretical developments.

FICAP-1 Proceedings

FICAP-1 Proceedings PDF Author: Justine Hitchcock
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 161233704X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 117

Get Book Here

Book Description


Animals and the Human Imagination

Animals and the Human Imagination PDF Author: Aaron Gross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231152973
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book Here

Book Description
This interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collection reflects the growth of animal studies as an independent field and the rise of 'animality' as a critical lens through which to analyze society and culture, on par with race and gender.

The Atlantic Monthly

The Atlantic Monthly PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 946

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Sympathetic State

The Sympathetic State PDF Author: Michele Landis Dauber
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226923487
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on a variety of materials, including newspapers, legal briefs, political speeches, the art and literature of the time, and letters from thousands of ordinary Americans, Dauber shows that while this long history of government disaster relief has faded from our memory today, it was extremely well known to advocates for an expanded role for the national government in the 1930s, including the Social Security Act. Making this connection required framing the Great Depression as a disaster afflicting citizens though no fault of their own. Dauber argues that the disaster paradigm, though successful in defending the New Deal, would ultimately come back to haunt advocates for social welfare. By not making a more radical case for relief, proponents of the New Deal helped create the weak, uniquely American welfare state we have today - one torn between the desire to come to the aid of those suffering and the deeply rooted suspicion that those in need are responsible for their own deprivation.