Rethinking Feeling: On the Renegotiation of Emotions in German Novels at the Fin de Sicle

(Hardback)

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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. Nietzsches 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-Salom, Theodor Fontane, and Hedwig Dohm as its analysis offers a new way of understanding the role of emotion in literary and cultural history.

Author Bio

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).