Happiness

Tracing how thinkers and writers have considered happiness across millennia, this study uses that long tradition to make sense of current theory. Author Jeffrey R. Di Leo treats the history of the subject as a lens through which to examine today's fixation on being happy.

The book is organized into four chapters, each offering a distinct literary-theoretical argument about the role literature plays in questions of happiness. Topics range from the neoliberal happiness industry and psychoanalytic objections to happiness, to aesthetic hedonism and revolutionary forms of happiness. Read this way, literature becomes a record of competing answers to the question of what a good life should aim at.

Because it draws on literary studies, critical theory, philosophy and psychology, the book is meant for a broad range of readers. It will interest scholars and students in those fields, as well as general readers curious about happiness and theories of emotion.