Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity

(Cornell University Press) Happiness became the ideal for eighteenth-century thinkers. But, as Soni argues, the century’s obsession with the concept paradoxically led to its obsolescence. In order to study this change, Soni looks at the structural transformation of happiness in works of literature and political theory and goes back in time to look at the classical Greek idea of happiness. Soni explains what it means to think a happiness available for judgment, rooted in narrative, unimaginable without a relationship to community, and irreducible to an emotional state. Soni is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University.