Rethinking Feeling: On the Renegotiation of Emotions in German Novels at the Fin de Siècle
Publication Date
2-5-2026
Faculty Department
Department of World Languages and Cultures
Document Type
Book
Abstract
Rethinking Feeling examines the literary renegotiation of emotion at the Jahrhundertwende, the turn of the century, a period of rapid cultural change when 19th-century moral values were destabilized and ideas about how one should think and feel became contested topics of debate. The re-evaluation of moral values around 1900 was inspired by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's writings influenced groups across the political and social spectrum in Wilhelmine Germany (1890-1918) and opened up spaces to think and to feel differently.
This book builds upon interdisciplinary research in emotion studies, Bakhtinian discourse analysis, and narrative theory to develop a new way of reading emotion in narrative prose works. The literary analyses in Rethinking Feeling break new ground in interpreting influential works by Thomas Mann, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Theodor Fontane, and Hedwig Dohm as its analysis offers a new way of understanding the role of emotion in literary and cultural history.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Yanacek, Holly, "Rethinking Feeling: On the Renegotiation of Emotions in German Novels at the Fin de Siècle" (2026). Faculty Scholarship. 47.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/faculty-submissions/47
