Wandering Feelings: the Transmission of Emotion in the Long Nineteenth Century
This day-length colloquium seeks to investigate emotional transmission in the nineteenth century.
Event description
‘If we accept with comparatively ready acquiescence that our thoughts are not entirely independent, we are, nonetheless, peculiarly resistant to the idea that our emotions are not altogether our own’ – Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (2004)
Although Brennan is surely correct in identifying the tenacity of our commitment to our feelings as our own, history shows that locating feeling has always been a problematic task. In the seventeenth century, a sore body part might induce a corresponding discomfort in another bodily region; in the eighteenth century, Hume wrote of the passions as highly contagious, passing ‘with the greatest facility from one person to another’. Feelings don’t readily stay in place: they wander, and get passed around.
This day-length colloquium seeks to investigate emotional transmission in the nineteenth century. A new unifying category of ‘the emotions’ replaced earlier notions of passions and sentiments, while scientific and evolutionary accounts sought to define how such emotions develop, and what they are for. The traditional location for ‘higher’ feelings – the soul – was challenged by theories of physiology which posited instead reflex actions and the localization of brain functions. At the same time, literature was pervaded by new anxieties about the consequences of too much feeling, and of feelings insufficiently under control, as political democratisation enfranchised the working class, and mass forms of production helped commercialise sentiment.
This interdisciplinary one-day colloquium will bring together scholars working in the field of emotional transmission in the long nineteenth century. It is a joint event, between Birkbeck's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and Queen Mary's Centre for the History of the Emotions.
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