• '

  Arc of Feeling
  offers a global history of the swing
  . . . [Moscoso’s] oscillation between scholarly learning, editorial intrusion, deadpan revelation and esoteric conclusion creates dramatic, if occasionally overwhelming, results . . . Arc of Feeling can be praised for its ambition and daring, which helps to justify the global scope.

  '

  Times Literary Supplement

• '

  After reading this book you may never see a swing, hear music, or have sex the same way again. Brilliant, wide-ranging, and fiercely learned, Javier Moscoso’s new book, like its subject, jolts our mind from its fixed grooves and sets our nerves a-tingling.

  '

  Barbara H. Rosenwein, Professor Emerita, Loyola University Chicago

• '

  A remarkable and wide-ranging work, tracing the history of the swing on a global basis, while embedding it in a larger history of the emotional significance of vertigo and balance. A striking combination of intellectual and popular-cultural history, with an unusually rich, imaginative range of sources.

  '

  Peter N. Stearns, University Professor of History, George Mason University

• '

  Arc of Feeling places swings in an – appropriately – dizzying series of contexts over the centuries from the gallows to the garden and from play to sex and death. Javier Moscoso's book is a real tour de force.

  '

  Peter Burke, Professor Emeritus of Cultural History and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge

• '

  Recognized for its childlike simplicity, the swing – as Javier Moscoso shows – boasts an emotionally complex history that stretches as far back as the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt . . . Throughout the pages of this fascinating study, the swing is revealed to have had many uses, functions and symbolic resonances across different epochs and cultures . . . The Arc of Feeling is an original, far-reaching, historically intriguing and erudite study that brilliantly weaves psychoanalytic thought with ethnography, archaeology, philology, literary criticism, structural anthropology, medicine, science, art history, religious studies, political theory, fine arts and affect theory. Moscoso has produced a mesmerising account of the swing’s impact on the history of experience, foregrounding its unexpected contribution to the emotional histories of love, desire and melancholy, in particular, and elucidating its formative role in the untapped development of feelings aligned with toys, games and playing, and the emotive qualities of pleasure and amusement. Moscoso triumphs in redefining the aura of transgression, transcendence and human possibility that continues to inhere in the relative simplicity and naivety of the typical playground swing.

  '

  Emotions

Javier Moscoso is Research Professor of History at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and his books include Pain: A Cultural History (2012).