Romantic Pasts - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism) by Porscha Fermanis (Paperback)

About the Book

Rethinks the characterisation of romantic-era written history as primarily sentimental.

Book Synopsis

Working against the long-standing belief that romantic-era history is primarily sentimental, Romantic Pasts argues that historians from Mary Wollstonecraft to Thomas Carlyle developed a new kind of cognitive or psychological historicism that was as much concerned with motive as with affect. Recognising that feelings could be a viable object of historical study as well as a sentimental or affective mode, these historians increasingly reconfigured psycho-physiological and behavioural processes as situated and historically variable phenomena that could reflect changes in social and historical contexts. Weaving together literary criticism, the history of emotion, theories of the novel and philosophies of history, this book rethinks both the paradigms of resurrection and revivification that have come to stand for romantic history and that history's place within the development of modern history.

From the Back Cover

Rethinks the characterisation of romantic-era written history as primarily sentimental Working against the long-standing belief that romantic-era history is primarily sentimental, Romantic Pasts argues that historians from Mary Wollstonecraft to Thomas Carlyle developed a new kind of cognitive or psychological historicism that was as much concerned with motive as with affect. Recognising that feelings could be a viable object of historical study as well as a sentimental or affective mode, these historians increasingly reconfigured psycho-physiological and behavioural processes as situated and historically variable phenomena that could reflect changes in social and historical contexts. Weaving together literary criticism, the history of emotions, theories of the novel and philosophies of history, this book rethinks the paradigm of resurrection or revivification that has come to stand for romantic history, as well as that history's place within the development of modern historiography. Porscha Fermanis is Professor of Romantic Literature at University College Dublin.

Review Quotes

Romantic Pasts is much more than a 'history of feeling', weaving together a range of complex and sophisticated arguments with literary, historical and theoretical analysis to consider the history of history itself. Historians of emotion will find this splendidly interdisciplinary work to be particularly valuable for its rethinking of the role of sentiment and its emphasis on psychology.--Grace Moore, University of Otago "Emotions: History, Culture, Society"

Combining a sophisticated appreciation of the historiographic with nuanced literary analysis, Romantic Pasts is sensitive, insightful and wide-ranging. In its examination of writers from Burke and Wollstonecraft to Godwin, Scott, Macaulay and Carlyle, this book gives an important new perspective on the complex role of feeling in configuring the past.

--Fiona Price, University of Chichester

About the Author

Porscha Fermanis is Professor of Romantic Literature at University College Dublin. Her most recent book is Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies (ed. with Sarah Comyn, Manchester University Press, 2021). She is currently the principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded project 'SouthHem' and is completing a monograph entitled Southern Settler Fiction and the Transcolonial Imaginary, 1820-1890.