Representations of Emotions

Discourses of emotions are particularly valuable for cultural and anthropological investigations because they are located in the space between body and mind, physical reaction and mental effort, the ,real' and the ,imaginary'. Emotions can only be accessed through their representations and these representations are always culturally conditioned, i.e. they provide evidence for the strategies which cultures develop to negotiate that space. The complex character of these representations invites the widest possible multi-disciplinary approach, for which the volume on Representations of Emotions has sought to provide a platform, combining literary and cultural studies, sociology, philosophy, history, ethnology and linguistics. The topics of the contributions in this volume range from the discourse of emotions in texts of the English Renaissance, on the politics of taste, feeling and sentiment in the 18th century to discussions of the social and moral functions of emotion discourses in the 19th and 20th centuries. Papers on genre-theory and the cultural control of emotions, on emotional responses to fiction, on the use of emotions in mourning rituals and on the linguistics of taste-words round off this collection of papers.