Synopses & Reviews
At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-class whites to Indians to enslaved Africans. Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights. In
Passion Is the Gale, Nicole Eustace describes the promise and the problems of this crucial social and political transition by charting changes in emotional expression among countless ordinary men and women of British America.
From Pennsylvania newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, correspondence, commonplace books, and literary texts, Eustace identifies the explicit vocabulary of emotion as a medium of human exchange. Alternating between explorations of particular emotions in daily social interactions and assessments of emotional rhetoric's functions in specific moments of historical crisis (from the Seven Years War to the rise of the patriot movement), she makes a convincing case for the pivotal role of emotion in reshaping power relations and reordering society in the critical decades leading up to the Revolution. As Eustace demonstrates, passion was the gale that impelled Anglo-Americans forward to declare their independence--collectively at first, and then, finally, as individuals.
Review
"[Eustace] carefully balances the factors most commonly considered when analyzing gender--race and status--against other important personal attributes in order to offer a nuanced analysis of masculinity and participation in the body politic in early America."
-Early American Literature
Synopsis
Analyzing the role of emotions in social and political interactions during the pivotal years of debate on the organization of society and the regulation of the self that culminated in the American Revolution, Eustace argues that emotional expression had a causal role in the social transformations of 18th-century British America.
Synopsis
"Eustace's unique contribution adds to the already bountiful number of volumes on the subject. . . . Well written and encompassing. . . . Recommended."--Choice "An important book in a field of growing appeal, and the University of North Carolina Press have given it a beautiful production."--Times Literary Supplement "Eustace's meticulous exploration of feeling's intersections with gender, race, class, and variety of power plays situates her book in the new history of emotion, but it is equally grounded in the older history of ideas."--American Historical Review "Tackle[s] an original and important subject and elegantly explain[s] complex developments with great clarity. . . . Exemplifies the best of recent cultural history by effectively fusing intellectual and social history."--Journal of American History "Fascinating. . . . An impressive body of evidence that incorporates personal journals, commonplace books, correspondence, political and religious tracts, public records, and newspapers. . . . An eminently humane piece of scholarship."--Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
About the Author
Nicole Eustace is associate professor of history at New York University.
Table of Contents
ContentsList of Illustrations and Tables
Introduction: The Rising Tempest
One. "Passions Rous'd in Virtue's Cause": Debating the Passions with Alexander Pope, 1735-1776
Two. The Dominion of the Passions: Dilemmas of Emotional Expression and Control in Colonial Pennsylvania
Three. "A Corner Stone
of a Copious Work": Love and Power in Eighteenth-Century Alliances
Four. Resolute Resentment versus Indiscrete Heat: Anger, Honor, and Social Status
Five. The Passion Question: Religious Politics and Emotional Rhetoric in the Seven
Years War
Six. "The Turnings of the Human Heart": Sympathy, Social Signals, and the Self
Seven. "Allowed to Mourn, but
Bound to Submit": Grief, Grievance, and the Negotiation of Authority
Eight. Ruling Passions: Surveying the Borders of Humanity on the Pennsylvania Frontier
Nine. A Passion for LibertyThe Spirit of Freedom: The Rhetoric of Emotion in the Age of Revolution
Postlude: The Passions and Feelings of Mankind
Appendix: Toward a Lexicon of Eighteenth-Century Emotion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index