CHEERFULNESS

Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination of the West. Hampton shows how cheerfulness -- a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit -- functions as a theme in the work of major artists from Shakespeare to Louis Armstrong. The book studies both the philosophical construal of cheerfulness -- as a theme in Protestant theology, a focus of medical writings, a topic in Enlightenment psychology, and a category of modern aesthetics -- as well as its role as a structuring element in stories and poems.

The book offers an original argument on a topic never before systematically studied. New light is cast on the history of literature, on the intersections of culture and psychology, and on the history of emotions.

TIMOTHY HAMPTON is Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and French and Director of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe and Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work.