Feeling Modern

A new look at modernism's relationship to human feeling and the public sphere

Modern architecture's evolution during the interwar period represents one of the most radical turns in design history. While the role of new materials and production modes in this development is beyond dispute, of equal importance was the emergence of a distinctly modern physical culture. Largely unacknowledged today, new conceptions of body and movement had a profound influence on how architects designed not only public spaces like the gymnasium or the stadium, but also domestic spaces. Hannes Meyer, Swiss modernist and director of Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928 to 1930, colorfully encapsulated this phenomenon in his 1926 essay The New World as "the advanced school of collective feeling." In their new book, Matthew Kennedy and Nile Greenberg explore the impact of physical culture during the 1920s and '30s on the thinking of some of modern architecture's most influential figures. Using archival photographs, diagrams, and redrawn plans, they reconstruct an obscure constellation of domestic projects by Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, Richard Neutra, Franco Albini, and others. They argue that the impact of sport on modern architecture was a discursive phenomenon, best understood by going beyond a mere typological reading of the stadium or the gymnasium, to an examination of how gymnastic equipment and other trappings of physical culture were folded into domestic space. The featured houses, apartments, and exhibitions demonstrate their architects' response to, and attempt to dictate, the relationship between body, and the spaces and objects that give it shape.

"Essays, short stories and poems by eminent creative writers, critics and scholars from three continents celebrate the literary achievements of Barbara Hardy, the foremost exponent of close critical reading in the latter half of the twentieth century and today. Her work, as the essays in the volume bear witness, encompasses 19th and 20th century British fiction, poetry, and Shakespeare. In addition to an introduction outlining and assessing Hardy's career and writing, there is an extensive bibliography of her work. Comparatively short, concise essays, stories and poems by twenty distinguished hands express the eclectic nature of Barbara Hardy's work and themselves form a many-faceted critical/creative gathering. Form and Feeling moves away from the traditional festschrift to create an innovative critical genre that reflects the variety and nature of its subject's work. In addition to Barbara Hardy's own writing, authors and subjects treated include Anglo-Welsh poetry, nineteenth century fiction, Margaret Atwood, Wilkie Collins, Ivy Compton Burnet, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. M. Hopkins, Wyndham Lewis, George Meredith, Alice Meynell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Shakespeare, and W. B. Yeats, amongst others."

This book explores experiences of illness, broadly construed. It encompasses the emotional and sensory disruptions that attend disease, injury, mental illness or trauma, and gives an account of how medical practitioners, experts, lay authorities and the public have felt about such disruptions. Considering all sides of the medical encounter and highlighting the intersection of intellectual history and medical knowledge, of institutional atmospheres, built environments and technological practicalities, and of emotional and sensory experience, Feeling Dis-ease in Modern History presents a wide-ranging affective account of feeling well and of feeling ill. Especially occupied with the ways in which dynamics of power and authority have either validated or discounted dis-eased feelings, the book's contributors probe at the intersectional politics of medical expertise and patient experience to better understand situated expressions of illness, their reception, and their social, cultural and moral valuation. Drawing on methodologies from the histories of emotions, senses, science and the medical humanities, this book gives an account of the complexity of undergoing illness: of feeling dis-ease.

The heart is an iconic symbol in the medieval and early modern European world. In addition to being a physical organ, it is a key conceptual device related to emotions, cognition, the self and identity, and the body. The heart is read as a metaphor for human desire and will, and situated in opposition to or alongside reason and cognition. In medieval and early modern Europe, the “feeling heart” – the heart as the site of emotion and emotional practices – informed a broad range of art, literature, music, heraldry, medical texts, and devotional and ritual practices. This multidisciplinary collection brings together art historians, literary scholars, historians, theologians, and musicologists to highlight the range of meanings attached to the symbol of the heart, the relationship between physical and metaphorical representations of the heart, and the uses of the heart in the production of identities and communities in medieval and early modern Europe.

Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe investigates the emotional experience of exclusion at the heart of the religious life of persecuted and exiled individuals and communities in early modern Europe. Between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries an unprecedented number of people in Europe were forced to flee their native lands and live in a state of physical or internal exile as a result of religious conflict and upheaval. Drawing on new insights from history of emotions methodologies, Feeling Exclusion explores the complex relationships between communities in exile, the homelands from which they fled or were exiled, and those from whom they sought physical or psychological assistance. It examines the various coping strategies religious refugees developed to deal with their marginalization and exclusion, and investigates the strategies deployed in various media to generate feelings of exclusion through models of social difference, that questioned the loyalty, values, and trust of "others". Accessibly written, divided into three thematic parts, and enhanced by a variety of illustrations, Feeling Exclusion is perfect for students and researchers of early modern emotions and religion.

Emotion in the Tudor Court is a transdisciplinary work that uses Renaissance and modern scientific models of emotion to analyze the literary cultures of Tudor-era English court society, providing a robust new analysis of the emotional dynamics of sixteenth-century England.