Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Jamie Bronstein, "The Happiness of the British Working Class" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Description: For working-class life writers in nineteenth century Britain, happiness was a multifaceted emotion: a concept that could describe experiences of hedonic pleasure, foster and deepen social relationships, drive individuals to self-improvement, and lead them to look back over their lives and evaluate whether they were well-lived. However, not all working-class autobiographers shared the same concepts or valorizations of happiness, as variables such as geography, gender, political affiliation, and social and economic mobility often influenced the way they defined and experienced their emotional lives.The Happiness of the British Working Class (Stanford UP, 2023) employs and analyzes over 350 autobiographies o...