The Centre for the History of the Emotions is\u00a0pleased to announce the program for lunchtime work-in-progress seminars over the coming semester.<\/p>\n
Our first session will take place on Wednesday 10 February and we are delighted to welcome\u00a0Aleksondra Hultquist (Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions) who will give a paper titled:\u00a0The Emotional Practice of the Amatory:\u00a0Barker, and Haywood\u00a0<\/em>(abstract below). Lunch will be provided from 12.45 and the paper will begin at 1.<\/p>\n All welcome but for catering purposes please rsvp to emotions@qmul.ac.uk if you plan to attend. Further sessions listed below.<\/p>\n The Emotional Practice of the Amatory:\u00a0Barker, and Haywood:<\/em><\/p>\n Amatory fiction supposedly has its basics established: we know its three primary authors (the \u201ctriumvirate of Wit:\u201d Behn, Manley and Haywood), we understand its purpose (to warn women readers against seduction), its tell-tale structure (the almost serial repetition of seduction and abandonment), its purpose (to mask political discontentment through sexual tragedy).\u00a0 There are full length studies on the genre (Ros Ballster\u2019s Seductive Forms<\/em>, 1992 and Toni Bowers\u2019 Force or Fraud,<\/em> 2012).\u00a0 But recently attention to areas of affect theory, including the history of emotion, demonstrates that much of our information about this genre is ripe for reconsideration. Most critical evaluations of amatory discourses articulate its significance in terms of its metaphorical power to embody political struggles; Ballaster and Bowers have provided especially articulate readings exploring the romans a clef<\/em> aspects of these works and the power that sexual narratives can play in political discourses.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This paper resituates amatory fiction\u2019s critical emphasis from political discourse to a discourse of emotional education. I argue that the experience and navigation of extreme emotion and the subsequent maturity of characters after seduction or the threat of seduction are exactly the focus of these tales.<\/p>\n This paper argues for how the genre of amatory fiction becomes the \u201camatory mode,\u201d a literary technique based on a vocabulary of the passions.\u00a0\u00a0 Created and regulated according to the love and sex narrative, the emotions of amatory fiction\u2014primarily desire, love, jealousy, and revenge\u2014enable us to classify the form more precisely than current definitions, which center on specific authors, prose structures, and a political resistance to patriarchal authority. If read as a playbook in Monique Scheer\u2019s configuration of \u201cemotional practice\u201d\u2014the mobilization, designation, communication, and regulation of emotion\u2014the genre moves to a mode.\u00a0\u00a0 Haywood\u2019s The City Jilt<\/em> (1726) illustrates one of the many plots of amatory fiction where love, jealousy, and revenge become the impetus for narrative structure and a redefinition of female subjectivity.\u00a0 I read this work alongside of Barker\u2019s Love Intrigues<\/em> (1713) to delineate amatory fiction\u2019s emotional, rather than formal, structure.\u00a0 This cross-genre approach clarifies the emotional practices these authors developed.\u00a0 While Haywood, and Barker\u2019s fiction often seem to accomplish different literary labor, their articulation of the passions is complementary: Barker\u2019s \u201cpatchwork narrative\u201d examines the detriments of not understanding or engaging in passionate emotion.\u00a0 Haywood\u2019s amatory tale examines how to survive the fallout of an emotional affair without long-term emotional or social damage.\u00a0 Such analysis highlights the oxymoronic realities of sex for amatory authors.\u00a0\u00a0 Their heroines elevate whole-hearted emotional engagement above socially prescribed roles, and, despite getting swept away by the wrong kind of love, they ultimately achieve a kind of agency and self-knowledge that is denied to characters who rebuff their passions.<\/p>\n ——————————<\/p>\n Full Schedule:<\/p>\n Wednesday 10 February, 1pm (Arts Two: 3.16)<\/strong><\/p>\n Aleksondra Hultquist (Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions) The Emotional Practice of the Amatory:\u00a0Barker, and Haywood<\/em><\/p>\n Wednesday 17 February, 1pm (Bancroft 4.24)<\/strong><\/p>\n Jules Evans (QMUL)\u00a0The decline and revival of ecstasy in western culture<\/em><\/p>\n Wednesday 9 March, 1pm (Arts Two: 3.16)<\/strong><\/p>\n Two short talks from the new Project Managers in the Centre for the History of the Emotions:<\/p>\n Helen Stark (QMUL)\u00a0A \u201cCharnel-Vault\u201d: Corpses in Walter Scott\u2019s Paul\u2019s Letters to His Kinsfolk<\/em><\/p>\n Sarah Chaney (QMUL)\u00a0Trigger Happy: Self-harm and emotional contagion in the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0century<\/em><\/p>\n Wednesday 23 March, 1pm (Arts Two: 3.16)<\/strong><\/p>\n Sarah Marks (University of Cambridge)\u00a0Was there a Communist psychiatry in Cold War Eastern Europe?<\/em><\/p>\n Wednesday 30 March, 1pm (Arts Two: 3.16)<\/strong><\/p>\n Simeon Koole (University of Oxford)\u00a0History of the Caress: Tactility, Teashops, and the Organisation of Desire<\/em><\/p>\n Monday 25 April, 1pm\u00a0(Laws 3.08C)<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00c5sa Jansson, \u2018Emotional Regulation\u2019 and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy in Sweden, c. 1995-2010<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Centre for the History of the Emotions is\u00a0pleased to announce the program for lunchtime work-in-progress seminars over the coming semester.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":820,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions\/820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}