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This book explores emotion in a range of literary works, in the context of current neurobiological, psychological, sociological and other empirical research.
List of contents
Introduction: studying literature, studying emotion; 1. Fictions and feelings: on the place of literature in the study of emotion; 2. What emotions are; 3. Romantic love: Sappho, Li Ch'ing-Chao, and Romeo and Juliet; 4. Grief: Kobayashi Issa and Hamlet; 5. Mirth: from Chinese jokes to A Comedy of Errors; 6. Guilt, shame, jealousy: The Strong Breed, Macbeth, Kagekiyo, and Othello; 7. From attachment to ethical feeling: Rabindranath Tagore and Measure for Measure; 8. Compassion and pity: The Tempest and Une Tempête; Afterword: studying literature shaping emotion: Madame Bovary and the sublime.
About the author
Patrick Colm Hogan is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut. He is also on the faculty of the Cognitive Science Program, the Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and the India Studies Program. He is the author of thirteen books, including The Mind and its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2003), hailed by Steven Pinker of Harvard University as 'a landmark in modern intellectual life', and the editor or co-editor of four books, including The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences.
Summary
Literature provides us with insights into the ways emotions are produced, experienced and enacted in human social life. Hogan's study explores emotions in the context of current neurobiological, psychological and sociological research. In each case, he draws on Shakespeare and writers from different historical periods or different cultural backgrounds.
