Are emotions, feelings, sentiments not the stuff of literature? That is where they project their inner logic' of aesthetic transmutation; there, beyond the instrument of language that they command. This collection explores how the lyrical virtualities of life-experience and the elegiac style in literature share a common core, lifting the human significance of life from abysmal vitality to esoteric heights, from abysmal grief to a serene reconciliation with destiny. The elegiac sequence' in the play of emotions, feelings, sentiments brings together life and literary creativity in its transformatory power.
With papers by A. Giuculescu, John McGraw, R. Ellis, A. Carillo Canán, B. Watson, S. Bindeman, R.J. Wilson, L. Kimmel, B. Prochaska, T. Raczka, Chr. Eykman, J.S. Smith, G. Scheper, S. Feshbach, I. Vayl, H. Rudnick and others.

Autorentext
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka is a Polish-born American philosopher, one of the most important and continuously active contemporary phenomenologists, founder and president of "The World Phenomenology Institute".

Inhalt
Section One Aesthetic Transmutation of Vital Emotions in Literary Creativity.- Two Types of Elegies: Goethe's Rome Elegies and Rilke's Duino Elegies.- Crossblood: Literature and the Drama of Survival.- Erlebnis of Story.- Longing and the Phenomenon of Loneliness.- Tragedy, Finitude, and the Value-Expressive Dimension.- Causes of Unhappiness in Dickens' Little Dorrit and Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman.- Section Two Mourning, Remorse, Silence, Mirth, in their Aesthetic Virtualities.- The Christian Sappho: Mourning Albertine in Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's Le Mal du Pays.- Concerned with Oneself and God Alone: On Kierkegaard's Concept of Remorse as the Basis for His Literary Theory.- The Subtractive and Nihilistic Modes of Silence: Heidegger and Beckett, Wittgenstein and Giacometti.- Words of Wonder, Wit, and Well? Well-Being!.- Between Elation and Sorrow: Aesthetic Experience in the Western European Novel.- Weltschmerz or the Pain of Living.- Vyacheslav Ivanov's Aesthetic: The Sonnet Love.- The Death of a Significant Other.- The Loss of Gregor Samsa, and Kafka's Use of Language.- Session 3 From Abysmal Sorrow to Ecstatic Joy: The Elegiac Transmutation of Feeling.- Ecstasies: Representations of Ecstatic Sorrow and Ecstatic Joy.- The Problem of Reconciliation in Remorse: Coleridge's Dramatic Theory and Practice.- Elegy Rebuffed by Pastoral Eclogue in Wallace Stevens' Sunday Morning.- Le Clézio: de l'héritage à l' origine. Étude du Procès-verbal à Pawana, le récit d'un secret.- La Literatura y la Persona Excepcional.- Index of Names.