Edited by Svend Erik Larsen, Steen Bille Jørgensen and Margaret R. Higonnet
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIII] 2022
► pp. 39–174
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.