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.

The iconic image of Wilfred Owen as the ‘poet of pity’ has reinforced a one-dimensional understanding of his poems that are more than just the sum of their emotional impact: they reimagine and exceed his major literary influences.This chapter explores the multi-layered achievement of Owen's work, both formal and thematic, that continues to invite re-reading and interpretation.In bearing witness for those unable and/or unwilling to articulate their war experiences, he turned his perspective outwards, away from the solipsism of his adolescence and pre-war adulthood, towards the soldiers he led and with whom he served. Yet Owen saw only five poems published in his lifetime; his posthumous reputation was shaped by other poets including Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Sitwell, Edmund Blunden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Jon Stallworthy.This chapter therefore also explores the cultivation of Owen’s mythic status and his poems’ place in national memory.

This chapter uses a close reading of The Lancet medical journal, and its radical, charismatic editor Thomas Wakley, to delineate the ‘high-water mark’ of Romantic sensibility as an emotional regime. It explores the ways in which Wakley and The Lancet leveraged the emotional politics of contemporary melodrama to critique the alleged nepotism and corruption of the London surgical elites. More especially, it analyses their campaign to expose instances of surgical incompetence at the city’s leading teaching hospitals, demonstrating the ways in which this strategy weaponised the emotions of anger, pity, and sympathy, and considering its implications for the cultural norms of an inchoate profession and for the ultimate stability of the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility.

This chapter considers the emotional interiorities and intersubjectivities of Romantic surgery. It challenges the well-established stereotype of the pre-anaesthetic surgeon as dispassionate butcher by demonstrating the ways in which surgical identities and subjectivities were shaped by a culture of emotional expression and reflection. The emotional ‘authenticity’ of pre-anaesthetic surgery was rooted in the embodied experience of operative practice, and the huge challenges that came from dealing with death, disease, and disfigurement on a daily basis. But as well as encouraging emotional introspection, the experience of pre-anaesthetic surgery also demanded that the surgeon manage his patients’ emotions. After all, in this period, fear, despondency, and other states of mind were regarded as an immediate cause of death. For this reason, surgeons needed to monitor their patients’ moods and imagine themselves into their position in order to regulate their own conduct and promote optimal operative outcomes. These relations between surgeons and patients were structured by a range of factors, notably gender. For that reason, this chapter concludes with a consideration of Romantic surgical intersubjectivity in practice, utilising Astley Cooper’s casebooks to explore the ‘emotion work’ of womanhood in the elaboration and understanding of breast cancer.

This chapter asks: when political emotions are invoked in the classroom, can this be done without the process of democratic education degenerating into a form of emotional and/or political indoctrination? The source of inspiration for addressing this question is Hannah Arendt’s political thought on emotion and education. The aim of the chapter is to show that despite the tensions and weaknesses that have been identified over the years about Arendt’s views on both emotions and political education, she provides compelling insights against the possibilities of political education degenerating into moral-emotional rhetoric. Arendt highlights the dangers of constructing political emotions in the classroom as the foundation for political action, while acknowledging the constructive role for the emotions in the development of political agency. The chapter concludes that Arendt’s insights on emotions and political education can help educators avoid potential pitfalls in efforts that (re)consider the place of political emotions in the classroom.

Matthew Goldmark examines the role of compassion in the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas’s famous condemnation of sixteenth-century Spanish conquest, the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552), which describes Spaniards’ violent attacks on defenceless indigenous populations across the so-called New World. Goldmark argue that in the Brevísima relación, affect justifies action; it is the sight of indigenous suffering that obliges the text’s royal recipient Phillip II to stop the violent destruction perpetrated by his unmanaged vassals in the New World. While scholars have mined the juridical, classical and religious source base that Las Casas employs in the Brevísima relación, few have placed emotion at the centre of this intellectual inquiry. In this chapter, Goldmark argues that emotion – specifically pity – is essential to the Brevísima relación’s defence of indigenous peoples and, as important, to its creation of a transatlantic imperial relationship between 'Indians' and the Crown. In the Brevísima relación, pity identifies a hierarchical relation that obliges intervention from a powerful imperial witness-authority. Thus, the affective imperative created by pity is not one of contemplation of an equal, but rather a call to action for an Other whose relation to empire remains undetermined.

This chapter examines major views of caring, compassion, and related emotional virtues, fleshing out divergences and convergences across traditions and disciplines, and exploring different understandings of their significance for education. In this chapter, views on these topics are organised in relation to their orientation toward the ‘empathy-altruism’ thesis. The empathy-altruism thesis generally contends that empathy, sympathy, compassion and the like can lead to emotional experiences of fellow feeling and positive relationality toward others, altruistic motivation, and benevolent deeds. It then follows that education should strive to cultivate these other-oriented feelings. Many philosophers, psychologists, and educators support this perspective. However, it faces challenges, also from across fields, among those who focus on the thesis’s limitations and possibly problematic educational implications. When it comes to caring, compassion, and altruism, this chapter shows that while there appears to be a consensus view on the merits of these feelings and related dispositions and actions in education and society, the blanket promotion of these emotional virtues is not altogether unproblematic. In this case, a more critical perspective on the empathy-altruism thesis is defended, as the over-optimistic view of these feelings and dispositions can fail to recognise the risks and challenges that accompany them.

This chapter examines Shakespeare’s interest in sympathy – both the word and the concept – and his representations of emotional correspondence between individuals, both real and imagined. Shakespeare’s works explore the relationship between the earlier understanding of sympathy as likeness and harmony (‘If sympathy of love unite our thoughts’ (2 Henry VI, 1.1.23)) and its newer association with ideas of compassion and commiseration (‘O what a sympathy of woe is this’ (Titus Andronicus, 3.1.148)). It is argued that Shakespeare was sceptical about the rhetorical ideal of sympathy as a straightforward or automatic process. After exploring a range of early Shakespearean texts the chapter focuses on Romeo and Juliet, which contains a notable example of the word sympathy, as the Nurse describes the shared emotions of the lovers: ‘O woeful sympathy! / Piteous predicament!’ (3.3.85-6). The fact that this speech contains some unintentional double entendres complicates both the Nurse’s sense of idealised harmony and the audience’s affective response. Shakespeare demonstrates that our commiseration for the sufferings of others is not simply the product of passive imitation or occult sympathies, but rather comes about through a combination of choice, thought, and judgement – and may differ significantly from the ‘original’ emotion being observed.

This essay reads Nineteen Eighty-Four in the historical context of the refugee crises that occurred during the early twentieth century and argues that the novel explores how ethical compassion towards the plight of refugees might be cultivated. In the totalitarian state of Oceania, regimes of racist nationalism and economic scarcity are enforced in order to scapegoat foreigners as threats, as Orwell draws attention to political systems responsible for fostering hostility towards outsiders and strangers. In doing so, Nineteen Eighty-Four suggests that compassionate and sympathetic responses to the spectacle of refugee suffering are neither innate nor pre-given in human beings, but are instead shaped by the socio-political systems we inhabit. Nineteen Eighty-Four thus remains highly relevant to the migration crises that are still very much part of our contemporary moment.

This essay analyzes the way that Edith Wharton’s writing frames the ethical and ontological relationship between human and nonhuman animals. Disputing a philosophical tradition that defines the difference between humans and animals on the basis of a capacity for language, Wharton – a committed animal lover – ambivalently suggests a less stark species boundary. The “humanimality” rendered in her work depicts human characters who are rendered animal through pain, through extreme experience, and through speechlessness. These representations are most manifest in Wharton’s wartime texts, Summer, Ethan Frome, and Fighting France. Wharton proposes that the appropriate posture toward both human and nonhuman animals is a pity based on the recognition of shared vulnerability to suffering. Yet her writing also frequently frames human–animal boundary-crossing as a mode of gothic excess, suggesting a pervasive anxiety about the very humanimaity that forms the basis of her compassionate ethics.