Feeling in the Long Nineteenth Century
Call for Submissions
‘Feeling in the Long Nineteenth Century’
Romance, Revolution and Reform, Issue 6
Since increased critical attention paid to ‘affect’ in the 1990s, studies of the experience of feeling have grown exponentially across a range of disciplines. As various emotions historians have shown, passions, feelings, emotions, sentiments and affections were equally at the forefront of the minds of nineteenth-century thinkers from Wordsworth to Darwin. This issue is interested in how these contemporary and modern affective debates have impacted, and continue to impact, the ways in which we think about feeling.
Recent publications like Zachary Samalin’s The Masses Are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust (2021), and Lily Gurton-Wachter and Tristram Wolff’s edited collection Romantic Poetics of Public Feeling (2021) have pushed discussion in new directions by taking up issues of collective feeling, unfeeling and unwanted feelings. This issue of Romance, Revolution and Reform is also keen to foster new routes and approaches to feeling. What models of feeling emerge in the nascent age of psychology? Who gets to feel what in the nineteenth century? And what should twenty-first century critical studies of feeling in the period look like?
Papers of 4,000-8,000 words are invited on feeling in the broadest sense (‘to perceive or be affected by’, OED v.1a), in or about the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). We welcome papers from disciplines across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and from scholars at any stage in their academic careers.
Possible topics may include:
- Terminology and language of feeling
- Radical and transgressive feelings
- Mind vs Body; modes of perception
- Sensation and the senses
- Medical feelings and pathology
- Affect theories; phenomenology
- The aesthetics and poetics of feeling
- Communities of feeling; affective networks
- Nonhuman affects; ecological feelings
- Ugly feelings and unfeeling
- Writerly and readerly feelings
- Intuition; supernatural feelings
- New frameworks for feeling
- The limits of affect
The closing date for submissions is 23:59 on Sunday 16th April 2023. To submit a paper, please email rrr@soton.ac.uk. We welcome early expressions of interest.