Feeling

In the Age of Reason, man was defined as a subject capable to think and act in a free and autonomous manner, as it was voiced by the famous 1784 motto “Sapere Aude” (‘Dare to Know’) of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Next to rationality, however, also feeling became an essential human asset. The conviction that social relations involved personal emotions and that people had to foster empathy and affective sensibility became widespread throughout the Western world. This chapter retraces the emergence of the culture of feeling in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century and points out the major role literature played in the articulation and dissemination of the modern emotional subject. For literature did not merely represent the affections that characterize modern culture; it also generated and moulded them by creating a language of emotion that readers appropriated in processes of self-formation that last until the present day.