What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion

Literature provides us with otherwise unavailable insights into the ways emotions are produced, experienced, and enacted in human social life. It is particularly valuable because it deepens our comprehension of the mutual relations between emotional response and ethical judgment. These are the central claims of Hogan's study, which carefully examines a range of highly esteemed literary works in the context of current neurobiological, psychological, sociological, and other empirical research. In this work, he explains the value of literary study for a cognitive science of emotion and outlines the emotional organization of the human mind. He explores the emotions of romantic love, grief, mirth, guilt, shame, jealousy, attachment, compassion, and pity - in each case drawing on one work by Shakespeare and one or more works by writers from different historical periods or different cultural backgrounds, such as the eleventh-century Chinese poet Li Ch'ing-Chao and the contemporary Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka.

Author: Patrick Colm Hogan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12/18/2014
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.14lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.79d
ISBN: 9781107477742

About the Author
Hogan, Patrick Colm: - Patrick Colm Hogan is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut. He is also on the faculty of the Cognitive Science Program, the Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and the India Studies Program. He is the author of thirteen books, including The Mind and its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2003), hailed by Steven Pinker of Harvard University as 'a landmark in modern intellectual life', and the editor or co-editor of four books, including The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences.