Writing Happiness

This book explores the link between literature and happiness. Ranging across an eclectic selection of writers, from George Eliot to Zadie Smith, it traces a hidden cultural history of happiness in literature from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Happiness has been seen as a near-impossible subject for writers, something that lacks the conflict that has sometimes been seen as driving literary creativity. An object of suspicion for literary critics, it has been linked to political quietism and complacency, and even attacked as mindless and uncritical. This book offers a new perspective on happiness, and on the relationship between happiness and writing. Through careful case-studies of an eclectic collection of writers, from George Eliot to Zadie Smith, it suggests that happiness and fiction might be mutually illuminating, and even inextricable. For the writers in this book, happiness is bound up with acts of attention to the world. It is interwoven with, or even essential to, thinking itself. It is also always subject to intricate political and ethical considerations, and this book shows that exploring the ways in which writers have thought about happiness might help us see it more clearly today. Making a case for the importance of the literary in cross-disciplinary discussions of happiness, this book suggests that any consideration of happiness needs to be attuned to the importance of creativity and imagination, notions central to the making of fictional worlds.Wide-ranging, conceptually ambitious, and deeply invested in literary detail, this volume considers the composition of happiness, and traces the risks, and the importance, of trying to write happiness into existence.