Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural HistoryCheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a new story about the cultural imagination of the West wherein cheerfulness a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit functions as a crucial theme in literary, philosophical, and artistic creations from early modern to contemporary times. In dazzling interpretations of Shakespeare and Montaigne, Hume, Austen and Emerson, Dickens, Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong, Hampton

private collections

Thapar explores how

pulverising a library he had painstakingly built for community use

Everything is ambiguous and vague

Rami remains calm in the face of her husband’s duplicity and plots to make an honest man out of him

the Pulitzer-winning poet Archibald MacLeish

In a newly-penned introductory essay that accompanies this volume

And like the revolutionary his political engagements are motivated by highly developed ideas

then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America

Merabak Sembah

Our bodies

an intoxicating reading experience that effortlessly captures complex historical events