Publication Date
2011
Document Type
Contribution to Book
Abstract
This chapter explores the intricacies of analyzing emotions as historical and cultural phenomena. Focusing on gendered assumptions that conflate emotions with women and the private, the chapter examines the contradictions between scholarly views of a wide-spread, public sensibility movement (in politics, economics, philosophy, aesthetics) and a more specific cult of sensibility associated with novels, a female readership and a separate domestic sphere. It argues that sensibility was pivotal to the development of Enlightenment emotional as well as rational subjectivity. Approaching emotions as complex cultural and historical formations clarifies how an individual of feeling was central to the emergence of the modern subject.
Page Range
21-45
Book Title
Sexed Sentiments: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender and Emotion
Book Publisher
Rodopi (Brill as of 2014)
Book Editor(s)
Willemijn Ruberg and Kristine Steenbergh
Book ISBN
9789042032415
Recommended Citation
Pribram, E. Deidre Ph.D., "An Individual of Feeling: Emotion, Gender, and Subjectivity in Historical Perspectives on Sensibility" (2011). Faculty Publications: Communication. 13.
https://digitalcommons.molloy.edu/com_facpub/13
Document Version
Post Print
Publisher's Statement
Brill allows authors to share their work in non-commercial online repositories and archives without an embargo under the following conditions: author manuscript, after peer-review into an institutional respository.
Comments
DOI https://doi.org/10.1163/9789042032422