Strange Fits of Passion
Subtitle: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: March 1, 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9780804725484
Subjects: Literary studies: 16th to 18th centuries; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; 18th Century English Literature; 19th Century English Literature; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; Literary Criticism; British Isles; History and criticism; Austen, Jane; Contributions in philosophy of passions; Hume, David; Literary Criticism & Collections / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Mysteries of Udolpho; Persuasion; Psychology; 18th century; 19th century; Emotions in literature; English literature; Hume, David,
First sentence: The fate of "individual feeling" is an instructive issue on which to examine accounts of the relationship between eighteenth-century empiricism and romantic aesthetics.
Description: This book contends that when late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writers sought to explain the origins of emotions, they often discovered that their feelings may not really have been their own.

It explores the paradoxes of representing feelings in philosophy, aesthetic theory, gender ideology, literature, and popular sentimentality, and it argues that this period's obsession with sentimental, wayward emotion was inseparable from the dilemmas resulting from attempts to locate the origins of feelings in experience.

Making its argument through a provocative conjunction of texts that range across genres and genders and across the divide between the eighteenth century and romanticism, Strange Fits of Passion rediscovers the relationship of empiricism to the culture of sentimentality, and the significance of emotion to romanticism.