“Memories inwrought with affection”
Emotion and memory in realism
With the development of the secular urbanized and industrialized society from the mid-eighteenth century, traditional ways of life lost authority and opened for new approaches to the past, and in the same period emotions began to be seen as a fundamental and universal core of humanity. Gradually, individual sensibility in public and private life and memories based on personal experience were given priority over the power of established traditions from the past to forge social and individual identities. Not least the French Revolution weakened the monopoly of existing institutions of religion, law and governance to determine cultural norms and traditions. With the pre-revolutionary ideas of emotion and memory as a prism, the early phases of realism explored the consequences of this historical shift. However, as realism gained momentum through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, it also intensified its questioning of the positive consequences of an effacement of the past and the adulation of the new, couched as it often was in unrestrained emotional pursuit of individual ambitions for social advancement. Without suggesting radically new ideas about emotion and memory until the end of the nineteenth century, realist writers exposed the dilemmas that triggered the transformations of the culture of emotion and memory in the nineteenth century.
Article outline
- 1.In the wake of revolution
- 2.The long eighteenth century
- 2.1Prejudice and passion
- 2.2“The vulgar practice of the moment”
- 2.3The thrill of the new
- 3.First transformation: Social vision descends into social frustration
- 3.1Between legal contract and national identity
- 3.2National illusions and realities of war
- 3.3Revolution as emotion
- 4.Second transformation: Self-fulfillment turns into self-disillusionment
- 4.1Self-education in a blind alley
- 4.2The superfluous man
- 4.3Passions for or against life?
- 5.Third transformation: From frail friendship to haunted homes
- 5.1The unreadable other
- 5.2The delicate balance of friendship
- 5.3Love or honor?
- 6.Fourth transformation: Alienating settings yield sublime awe
- 6.1Landscape and cityscape
- 6.1.1Arousing the senses
- 6.1.2Misreading the signs
- 6.2The natural and the technological sublime
- 6.2.1The beautiful
- 6.2.2The natural sublime
- 6.2.3The technological sublime
- 7.Coda: Turning the century
- 7.1New theories
- 7.2“At the heart of a vast enigma”
- 7.3Into the twentieth century
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Notes
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Works cited