Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300068093 ISBN 13: 9780300068092

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1997

Synopsis

This provocative volume investigates the ways that changes in ideologies of the family, class, race, gender, and sexuality over the past two centuries have influenced Americans` visions of self and psyche. Challenging the premises of psychohistory, the authors explore "the psychological" as a changing cultural category and "emotions" as historically shifting self-definitions.

About this title

From the Back Cover

In this fascinating book, distinguished interdisciplinary scholars show that the ways Americans imagine 'innerness' and emotions have been shaped by mass media, economics, domesticity, and the arts.

About the Author

Joel Pfister is associate professor of American Studies and English at Wesleyan University and the author of The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne's Fiction and Staging Depth: Eugene O'Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse. Nancy Schnog has taught American literature and civilization at Middlebury College and is currently a visiting lecturer in the department of English at Tel Aviv University. She has published studies of nineteenth-century literary culture and is now completing a book entitled Inside the Sentimental: The Psychological Work of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing. She is also a book critic for The Jerusalem Post.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0300068093
• ISBN 13: 9780300068092
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 344
• Editor: Pfister Mr. Joel, Schnog Ms. Nancy