Introduction: 'Solemn sympathy'; 1. 'A sympathy of affections': sympathy, love and friendship in Elizabethan prose fiction; 2. 'Compassion and mercie draw teares from the godlyfull often': the rhetoric of sympathy in the early modern sermon; 3. 'Grief best is pleased with grief's society': female complaint and the transmission of sympathy; 4. 'O, what a sympathy of woe is this': passionate sympathy in late Elizabethan drama; 5. 'Soveraignes have a sympathie with subjects': the politics of sympathy in Jacobean England; 6. 'As God loves sympathy, God loves symphony': sympathy at a distance in Caroline England Coda.
The first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of sympathy in early modern Anglophone literature and culture.
Richard Meek is Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. He is the author of Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (2009) and co-editor of Shakespeare's Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (2008), The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2015), and Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (2019).
'A wonderfully perceptive book, written with great empathy. Meek is
an astute reader of early modern literature, but his book also
attends carefully to the ethical and spiritual possibilities of
compassion in the wider world. A brilliant addition to scholarship
on the history of emotion.' Katharine A. Craik, Oxford Brookes
University
'Lucid, learned, nimble, and persuasive, Sympathy in Early Modern
Literature and Culture is a must-read for anyone interested in the
history of emotions in early modern England. In contrast to the
commonplace that widespread fascination with what we might now call
empathy begins in the eighteenth century, Meek shows how it emerges
in the sixteenth century, presaging its importance for later
thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Hume. In contrast to recent
claims that Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood emotions
primarily as effects of physical humours, Meek reveals their
profound sense of the human mind as immaterial and
intersubjective.' Patrick Gray, Durham University
'Sympathy is a key emotion in affect studies and the history of
feeling because its changing meanings reveal not just how this
particular emotion was experienced and understood, but also how
writers have considered the movement of affect more generally from
one individual to others. Richard Meek's interdisciplinary analysis
of an impressive range of early modern English texts (both literary
and non-literary, and both canonical and under-examined) is
therefore crucially relevant to historical and contemporary emotion
studies. Tracing the semantic shifts in the word 'sympathy' and its
imaginative and metaphorical use in the period – from describing a
magical affinity or transmission between physical objects and
substances in texts of natural philosophy, for instance, to its
transpositions denoting compassion or pity in religious texts, to
its evaluation as a politically potent and sometimes failed
'fellow-feeling' in dramatic works including King Lear, Meek
unravels any simple historical understanding of this emotion's
emergence in the eighteenth century. He insists instead that
sympathy's widening use and accretion of meanings in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries reveals a growing understanding of this
fundamental emotion as intersubjective, as well as both mimetic and
willed.' Cora Fox, Arizona State University
'... [this book] stands as a remarkable achievement that
demonstrates why all readers of early modern literature should pay
attention to the workings of emotion. … In my estimation, one of
the highest compliments you can give an academic book is to say
that you instantly see how its insights will shed light on material
beyond what is covered in the text properly: this is certainly the
case with Meek's scholarship. His book is a shining example of why
the literary history of emotion is such an exciting area of inquiry
- and it will also richly reward those with investments in other
fields.' Bradley J. Irish, The Review of English Studies
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
