A Feeling for Things, Past and Present

Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of the state of cross-disciplinary research into objects and emotions. It considers major intellectual works from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, art and design history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology from the perspective of the history of emotions, in order to assess which current major directions in these fields may be most useful for those seeking to write affective histories of the material world. By investigating the critical history of objects and emotions and reflecting on the state of the field today, the authors offer an interdisciplinary frame for the essays that follow, outlining various methodologies and their implications for emotions research in the humanities in general.

Breaking the peace: Representation, affect and materiality in pre-modern England

“…By the 1550s, when Becon was writing, it was conceivable that a pax could be destroyed for its insignificance, or for anger caused by its clericalism, but not, as thirty years previously in Theydon Garnon, for, and despite, its sacred importance (cf. Downes et al, 2018a: 13).…”

Resisting Silences: Gender and Family Trauma in Eighteenth‐Century England

“…As an object, it becomes another type of text -one communicating its creator's emotions and eliciting or inflecting users' emotional responses. 168 By excising family documents to erase uncomfortable secrets, the Newdigates pointed directly to them. Where the indices in Newdigate's account books note that further details of the dispute were to follow, crucial parts have disappeared.…”

Children’s Emotional Formations in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, around the First World War

“…Focusing on material that is largely overtly didactic, I measure its reception among children in order to try to understand children's emotional formations and the emotional frontiers they traversed in their daily lives. 1 The argument here is that a childhood sense of belongingto nation, to empirewas predicated on children's formulations of their role in the war and their identification with the war 'effort', and that these formulations were deeply entangled with reading and handling certain types of print. The article therefore begins by introducing the concepts of formations and frontiers, connecting them to material culture and cultural heritage.…”