General topics: 'The emotions and the arts in nineteenth-century english literature'

Abstract

The arts represent, express, suggest, and provoke emotions. Novels, tragedies, comedies, poetry, as well as the visual arts, depict human actions, sentiments, and values. Paradoxically, for several decades literary and art critics have not been interested in the most obvious dimension of literature and the arts, that of affectivity. This project will explore the ways in which nineteenth-century authors, artists, sculptors and musicians imagined and represented emotion, and how writers and critics conceptualised the emotional aspects of aesthetic response. It aims to map the state of the field in this growing area of interest for nineteenth-century scholars by locating recent interdisciplinary work on sentimentality and art and writing and the senses within wider debates about the relationship between psychology and aesthetics in the long-nineteenth century. How did Victorian artists represent feeling and how were these feelings aestheticised? What rhetorical strategies did Victorian writers use to figure aesthetic response? What expressive codes and conventions were familiar to the Victorians? Which nineteenth-century scientific developments affected artistic production and what impact did these have on affective reactions?