Sophie Cooper is a third year PhD student and William McFarlane Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. She is studying Irish communities in Melbourne and Chicago between 1850 and 1890, specifically in relation to situational influences on identity formation and nationalist thought. Sophie tweets using the handle @SophcoCooper and more information can be found on her academia page If E___ be really a living thing of a warm heart – all elevated sentiments & deep womanly passions – not a
Read moreTag: Emotions
Review: Ian Hislop’s ‘Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain’
Jennifer Wallis (QMUL) Figure One: Ian Hislop and his many hats! Ian Hislop’s three-part series Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain aims to ‘[explore] emotion and identity over the last 300 years’ – or more pertinently, how (and indeed, if) we British have attempted to tame, bottle up, and alter our emotions. Screening the history of emotions may not be as straightforward as the history of surgery or of World War One, but Stiff Upper Lip is a
Read moreFiction, Feeling, and Social Change
Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel, by Carolyn Betensky, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, 224 pp., £33.95 (hardback), ISBN 0813930618 Victorian Social Activists’ Novels edited by Oliver Lovesay, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011, 4 Volume Set, 1456 pages, £350.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 1 85196 629 5 Is there inherent ethical value in feeling for, or with, the suffering of others? In Feeling for the Poor, Carolyn Betensky argues that Victorian novels about poverty
Read more