British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Emma Mason

Romantic Affections

This paper will discuss the discourse of affection as it emerges in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literature. As a term, affection has not been widely addressed by scholars for two central reasons: first, because of its distinctly religious foundation; and second, because it signifies as a thoughtful, or reasoned form of emotion that breaks down the distinction between thought and feeling. Within my discussion, I will briefly consider how affection arises at the beginning of the eighteenth century as a christian term used to denote a benevolent and thoughtful form of devotional feeling the believer ideally directs towards, and receives back from, God. This notion is developed centrally by William Fenner and Isaac Watts, and is taken up and developed by preachers such as John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards. At the same time, the strictly interpersonal aspect of affection is discussed by Shaftesbury, Hume and Adam Smith as warranting a communal and gentle feeling to be set against the intensity of enthusiasm. My interest, however, is in how affection comes to signify in the lyric poetry of several Romantic figures, notably Anna Barbauld, Felicia Hemans and William Wordsworth. For the Romantics, affection announces a christianised sensibility that is dependent on relationships forged between people, principally through reading poetry. Yet affection retains its thoughtful foundation, discussed by Fenner and Watts, in that it remains anchored in a feeling heart balanced by the individual’s reasoning powers. I will close by reading some of Wordsworth’s lyrics in the light of this and argue that the feeling expressed in his work is not so much spontaneous as thoughtful and spiritual: ultimately declarative of affection.

Emma Mason was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Corpus Christi, Oxford, before beginning a Lectureship in Nineteenth-Century Poetry at the University of Warwick in October, 2004. Her main interest is the relationship between emotion, aesthetics and religion in Romantic poetry and she is currently working on a study of this called The Romantic Affections: Lyric Poetry and Religious Feeling 1775-1840. With Isobel Armstrong, she is organiser of the ‘Languages of Emotion’ conference taking place at the Institute of English Studies in London in 2004. She has most recently written on Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans and the ‘spasmodic’ poets and her book, Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century, was published in 2003.