Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650-1850

Spaces for Feeling explores how English and Scottish people experienced sociabilities and socialities from 1650 to 1850, and investigates their operation through emotional practices and particular spaces. The collection highlights the forms, practices, and memberships of these varied spaces for feeling in this two hundred year period and charts the shifting conceptualisations of emotions that underpinned them. The authors employ historical, literary, and visual history approaches to analyse a series of literary and art works, emerging forms of print media such as pamphlet propaganda, newspapers, and periodicals, and familial and personal sources such as letters, in order to tease out how particular communities were shaped and cohered through distinct emotional practices in specific spaces of feeling. This collection studies the function of emotions in group formations in Britain during a period that has attracted widespread scholarly interest in the creation and meaning of sociabilities in particular. From clubs and societies to families and households, essays here examine how emotional practices could sustain particular associations, create new social communities and disrupt the capacity of a specific cohort to operate successfully. This timely collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of the history of emotions.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction: Spaces for Feeling: Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850, Susan Broomhall 1. ‘At my mother’s house’: Community and Household Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Scottish Infanticide Narratives, Joanne McEwan 2. The Mysteries of Popery Unveiled: Affective Language in John Coustos’s and Anthony Gavín’s Accounts of the Inquisition, Giovanni Tarantino 3. Renovating Affections: Reconstructing the Atholl Family in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, Susan Broomhall 4. Bringing Order to the Passions: Eliza Haywood’s Fiction, 1719 and 1748, Aleksondra Hultquist 5. Marginal Households and their Emotions: The ‘Kept Mistress’ in Enlightenment Edinburgh, Katie Barclay 6. ‘Strolling Roxanas’: Sexual Transgression and Social Satire in the Eighteenth Century, Katrina O’Loughlin 7. Weeping in Space: Tears, Feelings, and Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Thomas Dixon 8 Hazlitt on Gesture and Hybrid Emotions: Individuality and Community in the Maidstone Self-Portrait and ‘Fonthill Abbey’, Richard Read 9. Faces that Speak: A Little Emotion Machine in the Novels of Jane Austen Stephanie Trigg 10. Feeling in the Wynds: Media Representation of Affective Practices in Urban Scotland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Susan Broomhall Select Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Susan Broomhall is Winthrop Professor of Early Modern History at The University of Western Australia and a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, 1100-1800. Her previous publications include (with David G. Barrie) Police Courts in Nineteenth-Century Scotland, 2 vols (Ashgate, 2014), and, as editor, Emotions in the Household, 1200-1900 (2007).

Review :
"This is an exciting collection that explores the intersections between spaces, both physical and imagined, and emotions in forging identities at personal, familial and community level in England and Scotland; pushing the history of emotions in new directions." Joanne Bailey, Oxford Brookes University, UK "This thought provoking set of essays inspired by recent scholarship on the history of emotions broadens the scope of analysis amplifying its impact. Taking seriously the analytical category of emotional community, the authors approach the concept scrutinizing a wide range of sources from an interdisciplinary perspective. The results are exciting, and they make for absorbing reading! Traveling among and between spaces and settings, the authors demonstrate how feeling was produced and shared in Britain during the long eighteenth century and how contemporaries imagined the co-constituted nature of reason and passion." Dana Rabin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA