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"Happiness in literature"
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Mourning Happiness
For many eighteenth-century thinkers, happiness was a revolutionary new idea filled with the promise of the Enlightenment. However, Vivasvan Soni argues that the period fails to establish the importance of happiness as a guiding idea for human practice, generating our modern sentimental idea of happiness.Mourning Happinessshows how the eighteenth century's very obsession with happiness culminates in the political obsolescence of the idea.
Soni explains that this puzzling phenomenon can only be comprehended by studying a structural transformation of the idea of happiness at the level of narrative form. Happiness is stripped of its ethical and political content, Soni demonstrates, when its intimate relation to narrative is destroyed. This occurs, paradoxically, in some of the most characteristic narratives of the period: eighteenth-century novels includingPamela, The Vicar of Wakefield, andJulie; the pervasive sentimentalism of the time; Kant's ethics; and the political thought of Rousseau and Jefferson.
For Soni, the classical Greek idea of happiness-epitomized by Solon's proverb \"Call no man happy until he is dead\"-opens the way to imagining a properly secular conception of happiness, one that respects human finitude and mortality. By analyzing the story of Solon's encounter with Croesus, Attic funeral orations, Greek tragedy, and Aristotle's ethics, Soni explains what it means to think, rather than feel, a happiness available for public judgment, rooted in narrative, unimaginable without a relationship to community, and irreducible to an emotional state. Such an ideal, Soni concludes, would allow for a radical reenvisioning of a politics that takes happiness seriously and responds to our highest aspirations rather than merely keeping our basest motivations in check.
eBook
I feel happy
A childs birthday party is a very happy occasion, and beginning readers get to experience that happiness for themselves inside this book.
Book
Afro-Nostalgia
The past as a building block of a more affirming and
hopeful future As early as the eighteenth century, white
Americans and Europeans believed that people of African descent
could not experience nostalgia. As a result, black lives have been
predominately narrated through historical scenes of slavery and
oppression. This phenomenon created a missing archive of romantic
historical memories.
Badia Ahad-Legardy mines literature, visual culture,
performance, and culinary arts to form an archive of black
historical joy for use by the African-descended. Her analysis
reveals how contemporary black artists find more than trauma and
subjugation within the historical past. Drawing on contemporary
African American culture and recent psychological studies,
Ahad-Legardy reveals nostalgia's capacity to produce positive
emotions. Afro-nostalgia emerges as an expression of black romantic
recollection that creates and inspires good feelings even within
our darkest moments.
Original and provocative, Afro-Nostalgia offers black
historical pleasure as a remedy to contend with the disillusionment
of the present and the traumas of the past.
eBook
My happy book
What makes you happy? This book celebrates everyday life in Ghana, West Africa, and helps readers identify different things that make them happy.
Book
The pursuit of happiness and the American regime
The Declaration of Independence claims that individuals need liberty to pursue happiness, but provides little guidance on the “what” of happiness. Happiness studies and liberal theory are incomplete guides. Happiness studies offer insights into what makes people happy but happiness policy risks becoming doctrinaire. Liberal theory is better on personal liberty, but weak on the “what” of happiness. My argument is that American novelists are surer guides on the pursuit of happiness. Treated as political thinkers, my book offers a close reading of four American novelists, Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy, Edith Wharton, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and their critique of the pursuit of happiness. With a critical and friendly eye, they present the shortcomings of pursuing happiness in a liberal nation but also present alternatives and correctives possible in America. Our novelists point us toward each other in friendship as our greatest resource to guide us towards happiness.
eBook
Sometimes we feel happy
\"One of the best feelings to experience is happiness. Young learners are introduced to various situations in life that can cause someone to be happy through age-appropriate and accessible main text. They learn how to embrace happiness and how to express it in healthy and inclusive ways that make others feel happy too. Short sentences and clear language translate this subject in an effective way. Eye-catching, full-color photographs and a useful glossary enhance this Social and Emotional Learning topic in a way that's sure to leave readers smiling\"-- Provided by publisher.
CHILDBOOK
Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness
Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness explores the novel's participation in eighteenth-century \"inquiries after happiness,\" an ancient ethical project that acquired new urgency with the rise of subjective models of wellbeing in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. Combining archival research on treatises on happiness with illuminating readings of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin and Mary Hays, Brian Michael Norton's innovative study asks us to see the novel itself as a key instrument of Enlightenment ethics. His centralargument is that the novel form provided a uniquely valuable tool for thinking about the nature and challenges of modern happiness: whereas treatises sought to theorize the conditions that made happiness possible in general, eighteenth-century fiction excelled at interrogating the problem on the level of the particular, in the details of a single individual's psychology and unique circumstances. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness demonstrates further that through their fine-tuned attention to subjectivity and social context these writers called into question some cherished and time-honored assumptions about the good life: happiness is in one's power; virtue is the exclusive path to happiness; only vice can make us miserable. This elegant and richly interdisciplinary book offers a new understanding of the cultural work the eighteenth-century novel performed as well as an original interpretation of the Enlightenment's ethical legacy.
eBook
Happy talk. A.M. Homes and Mark Epstein
Writer A.M. Homes & Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein.
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