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Hampton, Timothy, Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History (New York: Zone Books, 2022). ISBN: 9781942130604.This is a valuable addition to the history of emotion – intellectual history division. Timothy Hampton, a comparative literature scholar, traces the rise of references to cheerfulness, and their meanings, from the later Middle Ages through the increasing routinisation of the emotion in Enlightenment and early nineteenth-century characterisations, to its commercialisation in the twentieth-century. Data derive primarily from literature and philosophy, but there are brief and useful references to nineteenth-century advice literature and to several more popular genres in the twentieth-century United States, even including the rise of Cheerios after 1941.While an initial chapter perceptively discusses the qualities of cheerfulness compared to other emotions, the book does not overall engage much with emotions history or consider available work on happiness, smiling or even cheerfulness itself. And while the study offers some plausible generalisations about changes in cheerfulness over time, levels of detail in certain chapters, exploring plot lines in Shakespeare or Dickens or summarising Nietzsche’s ruminations on cheerfulness, may seem somewhat distracting.The core argument, and the book’s first two (of three) sections, are fascinating, however. Hampton sees the origins of references to cheerfulness in new
"Emotions: History, Culture, Society" – Brill
Published: Jun 22, 2022
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