Overview

Holly A. Yanacek traces a new history of emotions through the German novel, showing how long before social media existed, literature and art played important roles in negotiating emotions with moral values as well as shaping public cultures of feeling. Rethinking Feeling examines the literary renegotiation of emotion at the Jahrhundertwende, the turn of the century, a period of rapid cultural change when 19th-century moral values were destabilized and ideas about how one should think and feel became contested topics of debate. The re-evaluation of moral values around 1900 was inspired by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s writings influenced groups across the political and social spectrum in Wilhelmine Germany (1890-1918) and opened up spaces to think and to feel differently. This book builds upon interdisciplinary research in emotion studies, Bakhtinian discourse analysis, and narrative theory to develop a new way of reading emotion in narrative prose works. The literary analyses in Rethinking Feeling break new ground in interpreting influential works by Thomas Mann, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Theodor Fontane, and Hedwig Dohm as its analysis offers a new way of understanding the role of emotion in literary and cultural history.

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Reviews

Rethinking Feeling deftly brings the analytical and the emotional into a mutually illuminating relationship. Much more than just a thematic study of how certain novels depict feelings, the book invites us to consider how literary works contributed, in a period of rapid modernization, to the ongoing renegotiation of social and moral emotions. Yanacek offers fresh, insightful readings of historically relevant works while also developing an original account of how literary criticism can advance the work of emotion studies. * Brian Tucker, Professor of German, Wabash University, USA * Yanacek’s Rethinking Feeling is a significant interdisciplinary contribution to fin-de-siècle studies, affect studies, gender studies, narrative theory, and more. Offering four insightful and informative literary case studies, Yanacek critically and innovatively engages with the representation of emotions in German realism. Through meticulous research and sharp close readings, she shows how German realist and modernist-precursor texts from the turn of the century both illustrate emotional expression and document how these expressions and the perceptions of emotion changed over time. * Jen William, Professor of German, Purdue University, USA *

Author Information

Holly Yanacek is Associate Professor of German at James Madison University, USA. Her research focuses on emotion, narration, gender, ethics, and the non-human. She co-edited Animals, Machines, and AI: On Human and Non-Human Emotions in Modern German Cultural History (2021) and Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary (2018).

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