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Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, "The Pursuit of Happiness"
(2008, Vol. 29, No. 17.)
Happiness our being's end and aim is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two
centuries old in the world.
Thomas Carlyle.
Following on the 2008 INCS theme, The Emergence of Human Rights, this conference willfocus on the pursuit of happiness, that elusive corollary to life and liberty. What form did happiness and the comprehension of happiness take in the nineteenth century? How, for example, did the legacy of the American and French Revolutions shape nineteenth-century understandings of happiness? What were the effects of burgeoning
industrialism? In keeping with the recent turn to studies of emotion, feeling, and affect within literary studies as well as psychology, economics, history, and philosophy, we
invite papers on the nineteenth-century contexts and genealogies for such work. And, in acknowledgment of our 2009 conference location. Saratoga Springs, NY, we particularly
encourage papers exploring Victorian pleasure-seeking as having provided popular, if contested, routes to happiness.
Topics may include:
Joy
Luxury and pleasure in a democratic republic
Wealth
Leisure
Beauty, art
Speculation (gambling, chance)
Family, friendship, love
Recreation
Rights, liberties
Race, class, gender and ethnic perspectives on happiness
Leisure
Virtue, working for the good of others
Health, spas, hygiene
The cultivation of emotions
Shopping / consumer desire
Vacations / travel
Misery, the absence of happiness;
and pain, the opposite of pleasure
Architecture of happiness
Keynote Speakers:
Robert Frank, Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University and author of *Falling Behind:
How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class* (U of California, 2007), *The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas* (Basic Books, 2007) and
*Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Success* (Princeton UP, 2000).
Darrin McMahon, Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University and author of*Happiness: A History* (Atlantic Monthly Books, 2006) and *Enemies of the Enlightenment:
The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity* (Oxford University Press,2001).
and
Adam Potkay, Margaret L. Hamilton Professor of English at The College of William and Mary and author of *The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism* (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and *The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume* (Cornell University Press, 2000).
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