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Representations of feeling in medieval literature are varied and complex. This new collection of essays demonstrates that the history of emotions and affect theory are similarly insufficient for investigating the intersection of body and mind that late Middle English literatures evoke. While medieval studies has generated a rich scholarly literature on 'affective piety', this collection charts an intersectional new investigation of affects, feelings, and emotions in non-religious contexts. From Geoffrey Chaucer to Gavin Douglas, and from practices of witnessing to the adoration of objects, essays in this volume analyze the coexistence of emotion and affect in late medieval representations of feeling.

Keywords

Emotions in literature. --- Affect (Psychology) in literature. --- Literature, Medieval --- History and criticism.

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Nineteenth-century Japanese literary discourse and narrative developed a striking preoccupation with ninjō-literally "human emotion," but often used in reference to amorous feeling and erotic desire. For many writers and critics, fiction's capacity to foster both licentiousness and didactic values stood out as a crucial source of ambivalence. Simultaneously capable of inspiring exemplary behavior and a dangerous force transgressing social norms, ninjō became a focal point for debates about the role of the novel and a key motor propelling narrative plots.In Licentious Fictions, Daniel Poch investigates the significance of ninjō in defining the literary modernity of nineteenth-century Japan. He explores how cultural anxieties about the power of literature in mediating emotions and desire shaped Japanese narrative from the late Edo through the Meiji period. Poch argues that the Meiji novel, instead of superseding earlier discourses and narrative practices surrounding ninjō, complicated them by integrating them into new cultural and literary concepts. He offers close readings of a broad array of late Edo- and Meiji-period narrative and critical sources, examining how they shed light on the great intensification of the concern surrounding ninjō. In addition to proposing a new theoretical outlook on emotion, Licentious Fictions challenges the divide between early modern and modern Japanese literary studies by conceptualizing the nineteenth century as a continuous literary-historical space.

Keywords

Japanese fiction --- History and criticism. --- Emotions in literature. --- Ethics in literature. --- History and criticism

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This book recovers the curious history of the "insensible" in the Age of Sensibility. Tracking this figure through the English novel's uneven and messy past, Wendy Anne Lee draws on Enlightenment theories of the passions to place philosophy back into conversation with narrative. Contemporary critical theory often simplifies or disregards earlier accounts of emotions, while eighteenth-century studies has focused on cultural histories of sympathy. In launching a more philosophical inquiry about what emotions are, Failures of Feeling corrects for both of these oversights. Proposing a fresh take on emotions in the history of the novel, its chapters open up literary history's most provocative cases of unfeeling, from the iconic scrivener who would prefer not to and the reviled stock figure of the prude, to the heroic rape survivor, the burnt-out man-of-feeling, and the hard-hearted Jane Austen herself. These pivotal cases of insensibility illustrate a new theory of mind and of the novel predicated on an essential paradox: the very phenomenon that would appear to halt feeling and plot actually compels them. Contrary to the assumption that fictional investment relies on a richness of interior life, Lee shows instead that nothing incites the passions like dispassion.

Keywords

English fiction --- Emotions in literature. --- Fiction --- History and criticism. --- Psychological aspects. --- Emotions in literature --- History and criticism --- Psychological aspects --- E-books --- Literature --- History of civilization --- English fiction. --- Roman anglais --- Roman --- Histoire et critique. --- Aspect psychologique.

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website andthrough Knowledge Unlatched.

Situated at the intersection of postcolonial studies, affect studies, and narratology, Affective Disorders explores the significance of emotion in a range of colonial and postcolonial narratives. Through close readings of Naguib Mahfouz, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Upamanyu Chatterjee, among others, Bede Scott argues that literary representations of emotion need not be interpreted solely at the level of character, individual psychology, or the contingencies of plotting, but could also be related to broader sociopolitical forces. We thus find episodes of anger that serve as a collective response to the 'modernity' of wartime Cairo, feelings of jealousy that are inspired by the slave economy of imperial Brazil, and an overwhelming sense of boredom that emerges, in the late eighties, out of the bureaucratic procedures of the Indian Administrative Service. Affective Disorders also explores in some detail the formal consequences of these feelings - the way in which affective states such as anger or jealousy can often destabilize narratives, provoking crises of representation, generic ambivalence, and discursive rupture. By emphasizing the social origin of these emotions, and by analysing their influence on literary discourse, this study provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between various sociopolitical forces and the affective and aesthetic 'disorders' to which they give rise.

Keywords

Emotions in literature. --- Imperialism in literature. --- Postcolonialism in literature. --- Literary Criticism --- Subjects & Themes --- General --- World literature --- Narratology --- Affect studies --- Structure of feeling --- Colonial and postcolonial literature --- Emotion

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A study of the emotional rhetoric of crusading, this resource investigates the ways in which a number of emotions and affective displays - primarily fear, anger, and weeping - were understood, represented, and utilised in 12th- and 13th-century western narratives of the crusades.

Keywords

Crusades --- Croisades --- Emotions --- Émotions --- Emotions in literature. --- Literature, Medieval --- Littérature médiévale --- Social aspects. --- Aspect social. --- History --- Dans la littérature. --- History and criticism. --- Histoire et critique. --- Emotions in literature --- Feelings --- Human emotions --- Passions --- Psychology --- Affect (Psychology) --- Affective neuroscience --- Apathy --- Pathognomy --- Church history --- Middle Ages --- Chivalry --- Social aspects --- History and criticism --- Émotions --- Littérature médiévale --- Dans la littérature.