The Navigation of Feeling critiques recent psychological and anthropological research on emotions. William M. Reddy offers a new theory of emotions and historical change, drawing on research from many academic disciplines. This new theory makes it possible to see how emotions change over time, how emotions have a very important impact on the shape of history, and how different social orders either facilitate emotional life or make it more difficult. This theory is fully explored in a case study of the French Revolution.

In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance. In "The Making of Romantic Love", William M. Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent - or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan from 900 to 1200 CE, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, Reddy tells an appealing tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.

Combining the perspectives of anthropology and social history, Professor Reddy traces the transition from precapitalist to capitalist culture in the French textile industry from 1750 to 1900. He shows how and why a new conception of the social order based on the idea of the market began to emerge, and examines the attendant political and social conflict. Focusing on the northern regional centres in France which led the movement toward mechanisation, the author - employs the methods of cultural anthropology to find that even by 1900 French textile labourers had failed to develop a social identity commensurate with the idea of wage labour. This discovery leads him to a critique of the market idea that suggests radical and prevalent interpretations of the social history of industrialisation as well as of the concept of 'class consciousness'.

The concept of class, along with its correlates -m class interest, class conflict, class consciousness - ramain indispensable tools of historical explanation. Yet research over the last twenty-five years, especially on the histories of England, France, and Germany, has revealed an increasingly poor fit between these concepts and the reality they purport to explain. Some historians have reacted by rejecting class; others have proposed bold revisions in our understanding of it that enable it to encompass new research findings. This study does neither. Instead, building on interpretive method Professor Reddy proposes to replace class with an alternative concept that seeks to capture from a new angle the fundamental relations of exchange and authority that have shaped social life in modern Europe.

The Navigation of Feeling critiques recent psychological and anthropological research on emotions. William M. Reddy offers a new theory of emotions and historical change, drawing on research from many academic disciplines. This new theory makes it possible to see how emotions change over time, how emotions have a very important impact on the shape of history, and how different social orders either facilitate emotional life or make it more difficult. This theory is fully explored in a case study of the French Revolution.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. aRomantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance.aIn "The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan," William M. Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocentOCoor innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan from 900-1200 CE, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, Reddy tells an appealing tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.