Emotions and War Medieval to Romantic Literature

by Lynch, Andrew; Downes, Stephanie; O'Loughlin, Katrina

• ISBN13: 9781137374066
• ISBN10: 1137374063
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-07-08
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Literature records, remembers, and recreates war and war's emotions in many forms: whether narrated by an eye-witness, an observer at distance, or one who contemplates conflict in the past, war is remembered through a wide range of literary texts, from narrative poems to personal letters and tomb inscriptions. The essays collected here explore the emotions of war in texts from the Middle Ages to the era of Romanticism, and in forms ranging from medieval chivalric biography to war correspondence in The Times. Brought together in this way, they show the impact of actual war experience on the literary production of emotions in the medieval and early modern periods. They illustrate how emotional life itself was – and continues to be - conceived and structured as part of human identity during wartime, in culturally and historically specific ways. By rejecting modern assumptions about the emotions of conflict, Emotions and War reveals the multifarious and discontinuous nature of historical emotions and emotional histories of wars past.

Author Biography

Prof. Andrew Lynch is the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, specializing in medieval and early modern literatures of war and peace. Drs Stephanie Downes and Katrina O'Loughlin are Research Associates in the history of emotions, specializing in literary texts written during the conflict of the Hundred Years War, and in eighteenth-century women's, travel, and civil war writing, respectively.

Table of Contents

Contents
1. Emotional Responses to Medieval Warfare in the History of William Marshal ; Lindsay Diggelman
2. 'Blisse wes on londe': The feeling of peace in La?amon's Brut; Andrew Lynch
3. 'Je hé guerre, point ne la doy prisier': Peace and the Emotions of War in the Prison Poetry of Charles d'Orléans; Stephanie Downes
4. 'He in salte teres dreynte': Understanding Troilus's Tears; Simon Meecham-Jones
5. Human Prudence versus the Emotion of the Cosmos: War, Deliberation and Destruction in the late Medieval Statian Tradition; James Simpson
6. Moving to War: Rhetoric and Emotion in William Worcester's Boke of Noblesse; Catherine Nall
7. 'I was enforced to become an eyed witnes': Documenting War in Medieval and Early Modern Literature; Joanna Bellis
8. 'Man is a battlefield within himself': Arms and the Affections in the Counsel of More, Erasmus, Vives and their Circle; Andrew Hiscock
9. Grief and Glory: The Commemoration of War in Seventeenth-Century England; Peter Sherlock
10. Remembering Civil War in Andrew Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House'; Diana Barnes
11. 'Terrible Delight': Art, Violence and Power in Early Eighteenth-Century War Poems; Abigail Williams
12. 'In Brazen Bonds': The Warring Landscapes of North Carolina, 1775; Katrina O'Loughlin
13. The Grievable Life of the War-Correspondent: The Experience of War in Henry Crabb Robinson's Letters to The Times, 1808-09; Neil Ramsey
14. Afterword: Locating Emotions, Locating Wars; Mary Favret