Pleasure, Happiness and Romanticism: A Critical Survey

Abstract

This survey article offers a brief history of literary studies of pleasure, and describes the intellectual context in which these appeared in the 1980s and 90s, when consumption was a major theme in the humanities and social sciences. More recently, a turn to ‘happiness’ in economics and neuroscience invites a new attention to ideas of positive affect in texts of the Romantic period. Other shifts, including the return to prominence of the aesthetic, and a turn away from certain aspects of ideology critique and deconstruction, have also encouraged a new look at pleasure in Romanticism, especially in the writing of Wordsworth. It details some recent publications on this theme, and points to potential avenues for future research.

Geoffrey Hartman and the Affective Ecology of Romantic Form

“…This renewed attention to literary form, and to the ways in which form allows history to register as affect rather than cognition, participates in two broader trends in Romantic studies that have already been mapped in this journal: the increasing attention to emotion and affect (Favret, ‘The Study of Affect’) and the return to prominence of literary form and the aesthetic (see Boyson). At the risk of reducing the complex distinctions between often very different approaches to form, I believe that Hartman’s work and the recent studies that take up his legacy differ in some respects from what Marjorie Levinson has attempted to systematize as ‘the new formalism’.…”