Call for papers
Proposals for contributions to a volume on discourses of anger in
the Early Modern Period to be published in the series Intersections are
invited. The volume will be edited by Karl A.E. Enenkel (Münster
University) and Anita Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin).
Intersections is a peer-reviewed series on interdisciplinary
topics in Early Modern Studies published by Brill (Leiden/Boston).
Contributions may come from any of the disciplines within the
humanities, such as history, art history, literary history, book
history, church history, social history, cultural history, and history
of ideas. Each volume focuses on a single theme and consists of essays
that explore new perspectives on the subject of study. The series aims
to open up new areas of research on early modern culture and to address
issues of interest to a wide range of disciplines.
Emotion, the perceived counterpoint to reason, has received intense
attention in the humanities and the social sciences in recent decades.
Anger, however, has traditionally been conceived as pertaining to both
reason and passion, since it involves complex mechanisms of rational
judgment of social situations but is at the same time characterized by
untamed/violent emotional repercussions. Aristotle held that anger was
the morally justified seeking of revenge following the incurrence of a
slight. Being thus conceived of as a social emotion, anger has since
been construed as being composed of sadness and hope, as involving
social and moral categories, and as mediating between the past and the
future.
Even though anger is characterized as a just reaction to social
misdemeanor, it has not been acknowledged universally as a socially
beneficial reaction. The Stoics insisted that it was necessary to
suppress it at the first showing of angry symptoms in order to achieve
freedom from the disturbance of emotions which forms the basis of the
good life; Christianity, where Stoic views were adopted very early on,
found it difficult to reconcile the idea of anger as the just reaction
of a virtuous man with its ideals of passivity.
In the Early Modern period, this already ambiguous conception was
complicated by a changing intellectual framework. The Early Modern
period sees long-term shifts between traditional systems of thought: a
mounting criticism of Aristotelianism, a forceful contestation of
Scholasticism, the factioning of religious belief and the emergence of
contesting theologies along with moral canons, the rediscovery and
transformative appropriation of Stoic and Sceptic doctrines, to name but
a few. We are interested in how the notion of anger is informed by
these developments.
Despite the recent surge in research on the history of emotions,
there is no comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of notions of anger
in the early modern period. There is a host of studies on ‚ancient
anger‘, and the Middle Ages have also received due attention, but the
early modern period has been neglected in this regard, despite a wealth
of sources and despite the fact that wide-spread speculation about the
emotions in general emerged in Early Modern times.
Thus in our volume, we ask contributors to discuss the fate of anger
with a view to the tensions between these developments. Contributors to
the volume are invited to trace the framing of anger in various
discourses in the Early Modern period, including theology, philosophy,
literature, medicine, law, political theory, and the arts, as well as to
account for changes in the discourses of anger in this era. We would
like to see discussions of anger as a contested field, one that is
goverened and defined in various ways by various discourses which may
nevertheless converge in literary and non-literary texts, images,
religious practice, scholarly debates, etc.
Fields of inquiry and questions to be discussed may include (but are not limited to) the following:
1. Notions of anger: How is anger theorized in the various
philosophical and theological schools? Are traditional views being
re-valued in the early modern period? Are there alternative and/or new
conceptions that gain momentum? Which re-hierarchizations take place?
2. The anthropology of anger: How do notions of anger tie in with
concepts of corporeality? How does human anger compare to divine or
angelic wrath or even the fury of spirits? How and in what regards is
anger gendered – can women be truly angry? How does anger relate to
notions of masculinity? Which modes of bodily, facial, gestural
expression are seen as signalling anger?
3. Social consequences of anger: What are the uses and functions of
anger? Does anger keep having positive connotations? How does anger
relate to notions of social order? How does it figure in debates about
the management of the passions?
4. The morality of anger: Is anger construed as a sin? Where does it
range within the hierarchy of sins in the various religious
denominations? What are the trajectories of debates about anger in
theology, in casuistry or in moral philosophy?
5. Anger and the arts: Does anger fulfil particular functions in
motivating narratives in literature? Are there genre-specific traditions
of representing anger (e.g. in emblem books, revenge tragedies, novels,
etc.)? How is anger reflected in music and the dramatic arts? Are there
visual codes for anger?
6. Remedies of anger: What remedies are there against anger? How do
medical attempts at reigning in anger relate to meditative or spiritual
practices to pacify an angry mind? Is there a shift in preferred
therapies?
The volume is scheduled to be published in 2014. Proposals of about 300 words should be sent electronically to both editors before 1 March, 2013:
anita.traninger@fu-berlin.de (Anita Traninger)
kenen_01@uni-muenster.de (Karl Enenkel)
The decision about the acceptance of papers will be communicated before 1 May, 2013.
For more information see: http://www.brill.com/publications/intersections
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