Preface

This book investigates a history of representation of emotions in the British long eighteenth century and in the context of a rising textual culture.It does so by tracing the trope of sympathy, which is pervasive in the British eighteenth-century writings such as aesthetic treatises, moral philosophy, and Romantic poetry.Sympathy builds sociality through the communication of feelings and is enacted in the practices of reading, writing and representation, all of which are changing drastically as everyday life is increasingly saturated with textual media.In the process, individual emotions have to be “flattened”(Adam Smith’s word) so as to be communicable, while at the same time, literary culture constructs the deep interiority of an emotional self.These developments enable the rise of political economy and psychoanalysis in the nineteenth century.As a historical project, this book is largely organized chronologically.Chapter I outlines a brief etymological history of the inward turn of emotions and sentimentality in the eighteenth-century Britain.Chapter II examines Edmund Burke’s aesthetic theory of the sublime.Burke emphasizes the acoustic dimension of words in communicating aesthetic feelings of sympathy.Chapter III analyzes David Hume’s moral philosophy of passions.It argues that Hume, by establishing himself as a “man of feeling,”attempts to domesticate as individualistic feelings that had been understood as impersonal and contagious.Chapter IV presents the phenomenon of what is called “poetic mediality”in the work of William Wordsworth.Here the oral and acoustic performance of feelings gendered as feminine is poeticized so that scopic desire is generated through the act of reading presented as anthropological speculation.Chapter V explores Adam Smith’s moral philosophy of sympathetic sentiment.Smith’s definition of a theatrical impartial spectator in a representational economy(in his writings on moral sentiments) makes self analogous to an exchangeable commodity(in his political economy writing) and anticipates the deep(sub)consciousness of interiority in psychoanalytic writings of the late nineteenth century.As an extended comparison and contrast with this Western history, the final chapter turns to examine late imperial Chinese pictorial culture in its imbrication with a “print modern”Chinese Enlightenment discourse of the New Culture Movement, where it argues that the representation of crowds’ activities of absorption and theatricality present an emergent form of subjectivity.By traversing divergent genres of writing and different cultural media, this book delineates a genealogy of the emotional self shaped by the material practice of a rising textual culture.It challenges existing versions of more abstract histories of emotion as well as sociological approaches to media studies, both of which present clear and clean histories at the expense of specific and concrete historical practices.Throughout, this book works(1) to explore the rise of visuality through a modern literary medium and how it co-evolves with orality and aurality in representing self;(2) to historicize and thus radicalize the work of writing in the fabrication of interiority;(3) to contribute a comparative approach to historical studies of media and modern literatures.(https://www.daowen.com)