Kerstin Maria Pahl – författare

The capitalist system has often been described by its critics as a heartless economic structure corroding social bonds and symbolic values. Its defenders and analysts likewise use narratives that position emotions as central to the economy. This book enquires into the history of these framings.To explore the role of emotions in economic practices and imaginaries, the volume presents case studies including original rereadings of well-known texts such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as forays into little-known histories such as representations of capitalists in post-war Turkey, and how art dealers strategically used emotions for navigating the market in interwar Germany. Rather than simply reproducing the image of “cold capitalism”, however, it offers nuanced investigations into the ambivalent images evoked by living and working within economic structures. In late-socialist Poland, capitalism felt “warm” and “fuzzy”, while pop culture of the seventies found it not destructive but cool, hip, and edgy.This book is aimed at students and scholars of social, economic, and cultural history.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylor francis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non- Commercial- No Derivatives(CC- BY- NC- ND) 4.0 license.

The capitalist system has often been described by its critics as a heartless economic structure corroding social bonds and symbolic values. Its defenders and analysts likewise use narratives that position emotions as central to the economy. This book enquires into the history of these framings.To explore the role of emotions in economic practices and imaginaries, the volume presents case studies including original rereadings of well-known texts such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as forays into little-known histories such as representations of capitalists in post-war Turkey, and how art dealers strategically used emotions for navigating the market in interwar Germany. Rather than simply reproducing the image of “cold capitalism”, however, it offers nuanced investigations into the ambivalent images evoked by living and working within economic structures. In late-socialist Poland, capitalism felt “warm” and “fuzzy”, while pop culture of the seventies found it not destructive but cool, hip, and edgy.This book is aimed at students and scholars of social, economic, and cultural history.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylor francis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non- Commercial- No Derivatives(CC- BY- NC- ND) 4.0 license.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Early modern life writing extended far beyond the written word. People were painted, drawn, and sculpted; their biographies were illustrated, their pictures inscribed, and their signatures considered akin to self-portraits.The Visual Worlds of Life Writing explores representations of individuals in the visual and literary culture of early Enlightenment England. At its centre are portraits and biographies, the most popular artistic and literary genres, which navigated concepts of character, identity, likeness, and difference, while increasingly staking a claim to aesthetic excellence. As potent cultural products on the art and print market, they were also key instruments of social formation at a time of nation-building, indispensable for the making of political culture and the public sphere.Surveying the splendid diversity of portrayals - from painting and sculpture to frontispiece portraits and book illustrations, as well as micrographic and calligraphic portraits - The Visual Worlds of Life Writing reconstructs how individuality and collectivity were fashioned across different media. A thorough reassessment of visual culture’s interplay with biographical practice, the book offers an analysis of the rhetorics of portraiture and life writing, a historical account of their sister arts tradition, and an inquiry into the social function of profling people.

Historicizing both emotions and politics, this open access book argues that the historical work of emotion is most clearly understood in terms of the dynamics of institutionalization.