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The emotions in liberal writing, c.1790–c.1920

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This volume from a selection of distinguished international scholars is the first of its kind to explore in depth the emotional dimensions of liberal writing in Britain over the long nineteenth cen...
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  • 16 December 2025
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This volume from a selection of distinguished international scholars is the first of its kind to explore in depth the emotional dimensions of liberal writing in Britain over the long nineteenth century. Addressing liberal writing in the public sphere rather than high political or parliamentary liberalism, it comprises a clear, context-setting introduction and eleven substantive chapters. The chapters analyse key texts and figures from the 1790s through to the 1920s and offer several different approaches to the central concern with the emotions and liberalism. These include examining the place of the emotions in the ‘good life’; the social and political function of the emotions; emotional rhetoric in liberal writing; and liberal theories of the emotions.

An electronic edition of chapter 11 is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence, and can be found on our platform manchesterhive here: https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781526185594/9781526185594.00020.xml

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Price: £85.00
Pages: 292
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century
Publication Date: 16 December 2025
ISBN: 9781526185587
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:

LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Writing / Fiction Writing, LITERARY CRITICISM / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Politics, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: general

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'This volume shines a revealing light on the emotional dimension of nineteenth-century liberalism, bringing to life its deeply human core'
Alexandre Lefebvre, author of Liberalism as a Way of Life

Introduction: Liberalism and the Emotions in the Long Nineteenth Century – Jock Macleod, William Christie, and Peter Denney

Theoretical Perspectives
1 Between science and social philosophy: emotion in liberal discourse at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries – Michael Freeden
2 Liberalism, emotion, and temporality in Mill and Bain – Jock Macleod
3 Victorian ‘artificial intelligence’: or what George Eliot teaches us about statistical modelling – Lauren Goodlad

Gender and Empire
4 ‘Strange manners’: liberalism and the uses of women – William Christie
5 Sentiment, violence, liberalism: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’s The Aboriginal Mother (1838) – Anna Johnston

Liberal Lives
6 A Byron among the industrialists: W. R. Greg and the structures of feeling of Manchester liberalism – Jon Mee
7 Liberal autobiography and the possibility of happiness: Mill, Martineau, and Spencer – Alexis Harley
8 A liberal intimacy: Leonard and Kate Courtney in the 1880s – Geoff Ginn

Aesthetics and the Senses
9 Listening to liberal religion: sound, feeling, and dissenting attitudes to public worship in the 1790s – Peter Denney
10 The ear of the liberal body – Sarah Collins
11 Sources of liberalism: the geopolitics of beauty – Regenia Gagnier