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Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment

Online ISBN:
9781501747137
Print ISBN:
9781501747120
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment

James Noggle
James Noggle
Wellesley College
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Published online:
17 September 2020
Published in print:
15 March 2020
Online ISBN:
9781501747137
Print ISBN:
9781501747120
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

This book offers a new account of feeling during the British Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects, including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness, and patriotic ardor, the book explores literary evocations of imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the period's understanding of sensibility. Each of the four sections of the book—on philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political economy—charts the development of these idioms from early in the long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith, the book's exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the scope of affect in the period's writing and thought. Drawing inspiration from contemporary affect theory, the book charts how feeling and unfeeling flow and feed back into each other, identifying emotional dynamics at their most elusive and powerful: the potential, the incipient, the emergent, and the virtual.

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