Overview
- Provides a guide for deploying affect theories to elucidate literary texts
- Explores a range of genres and historical eras
- Evaluates affect theories to assess their usefulness to critical theorists
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism (PSATLC)
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Affective Transmissions, Romantic to Victorian
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Front Matter
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Modernist Contingencies: Engaging the Ineffable
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Front Matter
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Bodies Write Back: Attending to Affect in Contemporary Writing
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice develops new approaches to reading literature that are informed by the insights of scholars working in affect studies across many disciplines, with essays that consider works of fiction, drama, poetry and memoir ranging from the medieval to the postmodern. While building readings of representative texts, contributors reflect on the value of affect theory to literary critical practice, asking: what explanatory power is affect theory affording me here as a critic? what can the insights of the theory help me do with a text? Contributors work to incorporate lines of theory not always read together, accounting for the affective intensities that circulate through texts and readers and tracing the operations of affectively charged social scripts. Drawing variously on queer, feminist and critical race theory and informed by ecocritical and new materialist sensibilities, essays in the volume share a critical practice founded in an ethics of relation and contribute to an emerging postcritical moment.
Reviews
“This collection helps us to begin to make sense of these intangibles by guiding our approach to the sometimes baffling ways that texts make us feel.” (Aleksondra Hultquist, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 33 (1), 2020)
“Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice presents a series of detailed, informative, and often moving interventions in current literary studies. Bringing together subtle close readings of a wide array of literary texts, from Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare to Ta-Nehisi Coates and Helen Macdonald, the collection offers richly suggestive critical engagements with the cultural and political consequences of literature’s affective power.” (Andrew Bennett, Professor of English, University of Bristol, UK)Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
Stephen Ahern is Professor of English at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. His work on affect and the cultural politics of emotion includes two recent books: Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830 (ed.)(2013) and Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680–1810 (2007).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice
Book Subtitle: A Feel for the Text
Editors: Stephen Ahern
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-97267-1Published: 12 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-97268-8Published: 31 December 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6311
Series E-ISSN: 2634-632X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 263
Topics: Literary Theory, Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, Contemporary Literature, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Medieval Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature