The essays in Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture, edited by Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian, prove that the history of emotions promises to revise standard accounts of historical change, to challenge the Habermasian account of the public sphere, and to negotiate between cultural specificity and human universality. Contributors to this collection represent the range of disciplines that is a hallmark of the history of emotions: history, literature, philosophy, political science, and psychology. Similarly, the essays address a broad span of cultural and literary materials that includes suicide notes, plastic surgery, satire, literary criticism, drama, fiction, and philosophy.

After the editors' introduction, W. Gerrod Parrott directs his especially useful overview of psychological research on human emotions to scholars of eighteenth-century British culture. The history of psychological studies of emotions that he provides is a careful account of the shift from an emphasis on universal theories of emotion to more nuanced attention to historical specificity and cultural variation. His proposition of universal “ur-emotions” (30), categories that might encompass similar but not identical emotional states in different cultures, is a provocative compromise between basic emotion theory's tendency to minimize cultural difference and social constructionist theory's emphasis on convention and language.

The focus of the volume's essays is literary culture. Phiddian identifies catharsis as an under-acknowledged element in Jonathan Swift's satire. Swift's “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1731), Phiddian argues, “performs an anatomy of anger, contempt, and disgust in the emotional reactions of readers, a mercurial questioning of the validity of readers' judgements and a paradoxical provocation of sympathy” (59). His analysis illustrates that satire's invocations of seemingly incompatible responses holds rich opportunities for the history of emotions. Jean McBain discusses conversations about marriage found in the Supplementary Journal, to the Advice from the Scandal Club, a correspondence between Daniel Defoe and his readers that was first printed in 1704. Wrestling with the concept of authenticity that this material's inclusion of pseudonymous letters problematizes, she argues for the possibility of emotional authenticity in cases of false authorship. An authentic emotional life is the goal of novels by Eliza Haywood, works that, according to Aleksondra Hultquist, reveal that “the intersection of philosophy and narrative provide authentic representations of private emotions in a public format” (86). In her discussion of Haywood's Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726) and Life's Progress through the Passions; or the Adventures of Natura (1748), Hultquist enumerates how the balance between passions and reason is instrumental in the formation of individual identity. Emotional experience also carries instructive force in discussions of the sublime, as Kathrine Cuccuru reveals in her discussion of the conflict between John Dennis, an early theorist of the sublime and frequent target of Scriblerian satire, and Alexander Pope.

Any work concerned with sympathy in eighteenth-century Britain will of course address Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Laura J. Rosenthal offers a new argument that a particular type of drama, one that solicits sympathy for vulnerable women, informs Smith's conception of sympathy. Theater, and not just the theatricality that critics have come to associate with Smith, is a crucial influence because it simultaneously engages sympathy's visceral and abstract elements. Smith's model of sympathy appears as medical conceptions of sympathy are gradually declining, and Emily Cock's study of rhinoplasty offers an illuminating case study that physicalizes theories of both medical and social sympathy.

Authenticity is one of this volume's key terms. Amelia Dale argues that George Colman's farce Polly Honeycombe (1760), whose heroine reads novels on stage, confronts the private act of novel-reading with the publicity of the stage. Here, if there is an “authentic self” we might ascribe to the dramatic character, “it is a ‘self’ produced by a layering of legible, external surfaces” (167). Authentic emotions are contested in the public discussion of suicide that Eric Parisot investigates. Conservative commentators who deny the legitimacy of suicidal despair and worry that printed suicide notes might prompt an increase in the self-destructive act reject in their rhetorical strategies “the civilizing trajectory from visceral disgust to socio-moral contempt” (191). With this claim, Parisot illustrates one way that the history of emotions can supplement intellectual history.

In individual essays, Glen Pettigrove and Michael L. Frazer turn to transitions in methodology and style that characterize the oeuvres of Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, respectively. Carefully differentiating Hutcheson's terms, Pettigrove identifies a tension in Hutcheson's early work that his proclivity for the mathematical analysis of emotions produces. Frazer provides a new account of the well-known transitions (or, as some readers have thought, failures) in Hume's career by arguing that the dry “anatomical” style of The Treatise of Human Nature (1738) gives way to the warm “painterly” prose of his Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741) and two Enquiries (1748, 1751) in response to the increasing belief that participation in print culture necessitated appeals to readers' emotions.

In an illuminating afterword, Conal Condren situates previous essays' discussions of eighteenth-century emotions against the backdrop of the lingering effects of the previous century's political upheaval. In English translations of Homer, Condren discovers a moderation of violent passions and a shift towards the socializing phenomenon of sympathy, a shift that identifies, through the literary history of the lexicon of anger, “a change in emotional regime” that promises to nuance historical accounts of early eighteenth century culture (245).

The volume's disciplinary range signals the promise of the history of emotions to have an impact on and unite multiple fields. The conceptual span of its essays—passions, sympathy, print culture, and authenticity—at times holds similar promise but, especially in the varied meanings of authenticity different essays invoke, at other times lacks cohesion. Overall, this collection's essays indicate that the history of emotions stands to enhance and challenge our understanding of eighteenth-century British culture.