A timely story of a forgotten emotion
Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about
the cultural imagination of the West wherein cheerfulness -- a momentary
uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit --
functions as a crucial theme in literary, philosophical, and artistic
creations from early modern to contemporary times. In dazzling
interpretations of Shakespeare and Montaigne, Hume, Austen and Emerson,
Dickens, Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong, Hampton explores the
philosophical construal of cheerfulness -- as a theme in Protestant
theology, a focus of medical writing, a topic in Enlightenment
psychology, and a category of modern aesthetics. In a conclusion on
cheerfulness in pandemic days, Hampton stresses the importance of
lightness of mind under the pressure of catastrophe. A history of the
emotional life of European and American cultures, a breathtaking
exploration of the intersections of culture, literature, and psychology,
Cheerfulness challenges the dominant narrative of Western aesthetics
as a story of melancholy, mourning, tragedy, and trauma. Hampton
captures the many appearances of this fleeting and powerfully
transformative emotion whose historical and literary trajectory has
never before been systematically traced.
