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Book SynopsisFor many eighteenth-century thinkers, happiness was a revolutionary idea filled with the promise of the Enlightenment. Vivasvan Soni argues, however, 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 Happiness shows 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: such eighteenth-century novels as Pamela, The Vicar of Wakefield, and Julie; the pervasive sentimentalism of the time; Kant''s ethics; and the political thought of Ro
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Soni begins his erudite, wide-ranging account of happiness with the Greek philosopher Solon's dictum, 'Call no man happy until he is dead,' and derives from it a 'tragic' conception of happiness, one grounded in human mortality. He then traces the happiness 'trial narrative' through the long history of philosophy and literature from Aristotle to the eighteenth century, especially Samuel Richardson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oliver Goldsmith, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie, Laurence Sterne, and William Wordsworth. Along the way he challenges conventional wisdom: where many have argued that happiness came into its own in the late eighteenth century,... Soni makes the case that serious thought about happiness had already runs its course by the 1770s.... This is a critical resource for scholars. Summing up: Essential.
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Table of ContentsIntroduction: What Happened to Happiness?Part One
1. Solon's Cryptic Injunction: "Call no man happy until dead"
2. A Mourning Happiness: The Athenian Funeral Oration
3. Difficult Happiness: The Case of Tragedy
4. Aristotle's Hermeneutic of Happiness: The First ForgettingPart Two
5. The Trial Narrative in Richardson's Pamela: Suspending the Hermeneutic of Happiness
Excursus: Notes toward a Prehistory of the Trial Narrative
6. Effects of the Trial Narrative on the Concept of Happiness
7. Marriage Plot
8. The Tragedies of Sentimentalism
9. Kantian Ethics and the Discourses of Modernity
10. Happiness in Revolution: Erasing the Political Concept of HappinessConclusion: The Afterlife of the Trial NarrativeBibliography
Index
