The establishment of an objectivist, anti-Romantic tradition in early twentieth-century aesthetics was no purely philosophical breakthrough, nor (as some have argued) a resigned response to the disasters of twentieth-century history, but in significant part an expression of elitism, fascism, and contempt for the masses, one already prominent before 1914. Writers from Schenker to Adorno insisted aggressively on the immanent structural virtues of master-composers’ scores and the irrelevance, or danger, of listeners’ own feelings. The same music-analytical prejudices still vitiate many contemporary attempts within the so-called ‘affective turn’ to theorize emotions and their history in music, not just in musicology but also in psychology. The very end of the book turns toward popular music and cultural studies as more productive embodiments of affective relationality, showing the resonances and continuities these possess with the sentimental-Romantic traditions explored in the book’s chapters.

The concluding chapter of this volume maps the contributions of the book as a whole, articulates possible future directions for further research, and offers a humanities lens to this conversation about youth mental health. Directions for further exploration include expanding the frame to encompass studies of affect and emotions (not just mental health), investigating the cultural politics of emotions (not just the importance of inner well-being) by situating emotions within political landscapes, enlarging the vocabulary of climate emotions (beyond the language of mental health), and queering climate emotions research.

This contribution brings racial affect theory to bear on the literary representation of Roman manumission, in the process developing new critical tools for the history of Roman slavery as a mechanism for racialization. Through a close reading of the freed man Hermeros’ diatribe in the Cena Trimalchionis, I argue for the centrality of racial melancholy to the discursive and social forms by which manumission came to be experienced and figured. The operation of this racial melancholy in Petronius’ text is decomposable into two distinct, but complementary, sentimental performances: paranoia on the one hand, and compulsion into (evasive) autobiographical confession on the other. The interlinking of these performances within Hermeros’ speech generates a melancholic affect, which I conceptualize as a disposition for managing and negotiating the grief of enslavement and manumission. In formulating and grounding this claim, I hope to clear a space for mutually enriching exchange among historians of Roman slavery, historians of premodern race, and those literary critics and cultural theorists who have been influential in setting the terms for the “affective turn.”

This chapter charts the affective-political communities that came together around the character of Jane Shore, the star of Thomas Heywood’s two-part history play Edward IV (1599). Not least of all in the theater, late Elizabethan Londoners increasingly came out to see and be seen. So too did their rulers, including notable forays to the Globe by the followers of the Earl of Essex and by the Duke of Buckingham. Across Heywood’s play, Jane Shore attains a similar degree of political celebrity. In the face of Edward’s incompetence and Richard III’s tyranny, Jane steadfastly defends the commons. Her popularity in the play’s medieval London was matched by her enthusiastic reception on the early modern stage. Edward IV was printed in both its parts six times between 1599 and 1626, and its heroine continued to hold the stage well into the seventeenth century. Together with the evidence of her reception in the theater, Heywood’s play maps Jane Shore’s public: the collectivity of strangers joined across time and space in defiance of royal tyranny and in pity for the beneficent Jane Shore, a populist heroine for the early modern age.

While it is only recently that disgust has been (re)assessed as a category of analysis for the Early Modern period, its temporalities are in need of further investigation. The chapter argues that disgust is triggered and represented by material memory objects in Hamlet and Othello. Here, disgust serves as affective response to the pressure of seemingly paradoxical temporalities – Hamlet’s experience of a past that is embodied in the untimely object of the skull, and Othello’s experience of a ‘future anterior’ that is mediated by and manifested in the handkerchief, respectively. In the two plays, the temporality of disgust is paradoxical: it simultaneously lags behind the memory object from which it recoils and generates the object in the very act of recoiling. By reading the respective temporalities of disgust both tragedies display, I suggest that the affective dynamics of disgust find literary analogy in the structural dynamics of both Hamlet’s and Othello’s fundamental dramatic conflict.

The introduction posits the centrality of local environments, and specifically precise London neighborhoods, on a confluence of English writers in the 1590s, including Thomas Nashe, John Donne, John Manningham, and John Marston. In the process, it asserts the importance of these urban localities to the genesis of the metaphysical style of writing, a style not normally associated with the city nor with nonpoetic writing. The methodological emphasis on local environment foregrounds the importance of everyday experience to the creation of literature, picking up on recent work in early modern literary studies in historical phenomenology and affect theory. The introduction also details the profound infleunce of skepticism on this group of writers and intellectuals working in and around the Inns of Court in the 1590s. It argues for the centrality of a specific community of disaffected and privileged young men coming to London in the 1590s to the advent of a particular way of seeing the city and a particular style of writing that we now identify as the metaphysical.

The introduction situates the book’s intellectual project within what scholars have described as an “affective turn” or “emotional turn” across disciplines and, more specifically, a recent attention to the relations between emotion, religion, and literature in the Renaissance. The introduction calls attention to a disproportionate scholarly focus on negative affect, and it provides the intellectual framework for the close readings of religious and literary texts in the chapters that follow. Theorists and literary critics have equated contentedness with passivity and resignation, but I reveal a model of contentment as dynamic, protective, and productive. Although Renaissance articulations were indebted to preceding philosophical schools, especially Stoicism, the English Reformation defined the ways in which writers constructed contentment from available texts and traditions. Reformers explored contentedness as an emotional means to preserve the self and prepare the individual to endure and engage the outside world. These efforts existed alongside representations and revisions of contentment by authors like Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, especially in their pastoral works.

The aim of this chapter is to map a line of theorizing affect and its entanglement with post-truth, and use this theorization to think about what it could mean for the role of educators—that is, what can be done in education to respond critically to the affective infrastructures of post-truth politics? This question arises at a historical juncture of widespread views that post-truth politics create an urgency for reframing post-truth experiences as productive pedagogical engagements. The chapter draws on affect theory to show how the affective grounding of post-truth claims works to govern our subjectivities and how affects and emotions matter in constructing certain truths that reproduce social and political evils such as racism, sexism and xenophobia. The analysis shows how this nuanced understanding of affect, governmentality and post-truth can be helpful in educational settings to respond critically to post-truth politics, while paying attention to risks emerging from moralization or indoctrination.

“’A Power Able to Overawe Them All’: Criminality and the Uses of Fear,” begins with a discussion of criminality in The Queen v. Eduljee Byramjee (1846). At the heart of the case was the question of whether criminal convictions could be appealed to the Privy Council. On the one hand, to limit appeals to the Queen would implicitly serve to undermine her absolute sovereignty. On the other hand, granting the right to appeal would undermine the authority of the colonial courts and intervene in the social, political, and economic uses to which Indian criminals were put. This chapter also shows how the fiction of Indian criminality became useful to the exercise of British sovereignty. As the last ready supply of working bodies after the abolition of slavery, and the end of British penal transport, Indian criminals provided essential physical labor for the territorial expansion of Empire. The rhetoric of Indian degeneracy, then, was central to both the ideological and material terms by which the British consolidated and expanded their sovereignty. (Word Count: 10,500)

The central focus of this chapter is on variations in Atwood’s perennial theme of sexual power politics, with extensive analysis of early poems in The Circle Game, Power Politics, and Bodily Harm, developing into an extended exploration of the interface between power politics in the personal and public worlds in The Handmaid’s Tale with its current sociopolitical relevance for women’s rights and human rights. This chapter concludes with an interpretation of The Heart Goes Last, reading it through Ahmed’s theory of affectivity, eliding personal and wider political resonances.

This chapter examines the implications of theories of affect and embodiment for posthumanism. It argues that the recognition of bodies as fluid, co-composed, material and relational constitutes a crucial site for the emergence of the posthumanities.  After examining the impact of Spinoza on Western ontologies of the body via Gilles Deleuze, the chapter addresses the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences and its consequences for how we understand affect, embodiment and the human. From affect as autonomous intensity to the cultural politics of affect to queer theories of embodiment in, this chapter shows how theories of affect and embodiment leads to the limits of the human and humanist knowledge production. This question of bodies, however, also exposes problems in the desire to move ‘beyond the human,’ when many racialized bodies were never fully counted as human. Scholars discussed include Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed, Anna Gibbs, Erin Manning, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Dana Luciano, Mel Chen, Eliza Steinbock, Zakkiyah Jackson and Jasbir Puar.

In this Introduction I begin by considering the interdisciplinary development of affect theory, and how it has been seen as splitting into two camps: that of the ‘cognitivists’, who see affect as involving emotion and cognition, and that of the ‘noncognitivists’ who don’t. I argue for a concept of literary affect that is neither strictly cognitivist nor noncognitivist. Through readings of Spinoza, Sylvan Tomkins, and Deleuze I show how they provide the basis for developing such a concept of affect, and I go on to develop a literary aspect to it through readings of a range of literature, criticism, and theory, including works by Longinus, Milton, Edmund Burke, Denise Riley, T. S. Eliot, Raymond Williams, William S. Burroughs, Virginia Woolf, and Lyn Hejinian. After giving examples of how a concept of literary affect is useful for reading texts, I outline the rationales of this book’s three sections while indicating how the sections’ chapters complement each other.

If affect theory is principally concerned to account for the visceral forces and intensities that relate human and non-human bodies, how might it help to make sense of the force and intensity of capitalist cultures of accumulation and extraction as they are lived, felt, and understood by subaltern bodies living and dying in the Global South? In what ways might the transmission of affect associated with the political and economic legacies of European colonialism shape the understanding of such contemporary cultures of accumulation, extraction, and dispossession? And how might technologies of representation, such as printed books, help to illuminate the ways in which the sign systems of the market economy, the media, and the state affect the bodies and lived environments of those who feel the slow violence of debt, capital accumulation, and dispossession most acutely? This chapter tries to address these questions by considering how subaltern histories are registered affectively through the transmission of human remains. Building on poststructuralist theories of subaltern affect and psychoanalytic accounts of affect in the decolonial thought of Frantz Fanon, it suggests that the histories of those whose lives are deemed without value and denied expression in hegemonic forms of speech and representation are nevertheless transmitted in the embodied experiences of subalternity.