Emotions through Literature

Mariano Longo has brought the sociology of emotions vividly alive in this sharp and penetrating analysis, skilfully incorporating portrayals of a wide range of people and passions figuring in literature from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to Roth's Seymoure Levov. Longo covers his field in a masterly way, showing how emotions, initially present in nineteenth-century sociology, then pushed aside to make way for relentless rationality, finally returned in a big way during the late 1970s. The exciting prospects opened up by focusing on emotions are triangulated by drawing on the perceptive insights of experts such as Norbert Elias, William Reddy, Peter Stearns, Susan Matt, Richard Moran, Dorrit Cohn, Donald Weslig, Arlie Hochschild, and Sandra Logan. Longo moves expertly between smart generalizations on modernity, consumerism, the neurosciences, collective behaviour, social change, love, and crowd behaviour to detailed dissections of specific works by Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Zola, Manzoni and many others. There is rich sustenance here. It will stimulate beginners and challenge specialists. - Dennis Smith, author of 'Civilized Rebels: An Inside Story of the West's Retreat from Global Power', Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Loughborough University, UK Because novels and poems name the emotions, putting them into narrative action, literature has always been the home territory of emotion. Now, venturing all the way across the bridge to verbal art from his own discipline of sociology, Mariano Longo shows that a major future assignment of this crossover field will be to specify with stronger theories how emotions are always relationships: social between persons, changeable in historical time. First he offers a critique of the history of sociology, where from circa 1900 to 2019 there has been a steadily growing acceptance that emotions have a rational, historical explanation as part of social change. Next he analyzes a broad international range of literary works to account for the mass-emotion of crowds, the effect of envy on economics and class-relations between the eras of Shakespeare and Trollope, and changes in love (and theories of love) from the Middle Ages to now. Longo doesn't come forward as a literary critic, but he has many habits of attention congenial to the works of imagination under study: he finds crucial turning-point passages to quote, he quotes at sufficient length to exhibit style, and he brings in already-existing literary criticism relevant to the purposes of his innovative theory. So in this well-argued essay, packed with persuasive literary examples, Mariano Longo significantly extends and complicates the sociology of emotions, and of research in emotions generally. - Donald Wesling, Professor Emeritus of English Literature, University of California, San Diego, USA; author of Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons (On Literary Emotions) This book represents a very important contribution to the sociology and to the history of emotions and argues that much of our emotions are embedded in micro narrative forms and cultural scripts. But the book does much more than this: it uses literature as the terrain par excellence for the expression of psychological selves and their emotions. This is a new and important approach to the sociology of emotions. - Eva Illouz, The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris