The Story of Joy

Adam Potkay is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, Virginia.

Joy is an experience of reunion or fulfilment, of desire at least temporarily laid to rest, of a good thing that comes to pass or seems sure to happen soon. In this wide-ranging and highly original book Adam Potkay explores the concept of joy, distinguishing it from related concepts such as happiness and ecstasy. He goes on to trace the literary and intellectual history of joy in the Western tradition, from Aristotle, the Bible and Provencal troubadours through contemporary culture, centring on British and German works from the Reformation through Romanticism. Describing the complex interconnections between literary art, ethics, and religion, Potkay offers fresh readings of Spenser, Shakespeare, Fielding, Schiller, English Romantic poets, Wilde and Yeats. The Story of Joy will be of special interest to scholars of the Renaissance to the late Romantic period, but will also appeal to readers interested in the changing perceptions of joy over time.

Preface; Introduction: what is a joy?; 1. Religious joy: the ethics of oneness from the Bible to Aquinas; 2. Erotic joy: the Troubadour tradition; 3. The theology of joy and joylessness: Luther to Crusoe; 4. Ethical joy in the Age of Enlightenment; 5. The joys of doing and of being: Wordsworth and his Victorian legacy; 6. Joy and aesthetics: Coleridge to Wilde; 7. Post-Christian prophesies of forgiveness and exaltation; 8. Tragic joy and the spirit of music: Wagner, Nietzsche, Yeats; Conclusion: the career of joy in the twentieth century; Bibliography; Index.