Affect and Literature

Alex Houen is author of Terrorism and Modern Literature (2002), and Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960s (2012). His edited publications include: a special issue on 'Affects, Text, and Performativity' of Textual Practice (March/April 2011); and (with Jan-Melissa Schramm), Sacrifice and Modern War Literature: Battle of Waterloo to the War on Terror (2018). He also co-edits the international journal of poetry, Blackbox Manifold.

• Introduction: affect and literature Alex Houen; Part I. Origins: 1. Poetic fear-related affects and society in Greco-Roman antiquity Dana LaCourse Munteanu; 2. Secondary affect in Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Nicolai Stefan Uhlig; 3. Affect and life in Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson John Protevi; 4. Feelings under the microscope: new critical affect Helen Thaventhiran; 5. 'We manufacture fun: capital and the production of affect Ross Wilson; 6. Jacques Lacan's evanescent affects Jean-Michel Rabaté; 7. The durability of affect and the ageing of gay male queer theory Geoff Gilbert; 8. Affect, meaning, becoming, and power: Massumi, Spinoza, Deleuze, and neuroscience Anthony Uhlmann; 9. Translating postcolonial affect Sneja Gunew; 10. Making sorrow sweet: emotion and empathy in the experience of fiction Alison Denham; Part II. Developments: 11. Feeling feelings in early modern England Benedict S. Robinson; 12. Laughable poetry Matthew Bevis; 13. Modernism, formal innovation, and affect in some contemporary Irish novels Derek Attridge; 14. The antihumanist tone Christopher Nealon; 15. Bette Davis's eyes and minoritarian survival: camp, melodrama, and spectatorship Amber Musser; 16. Affective form Ankhi Mukherjee; 17. Subaltern affects Stephen Morton; Part III. Applications: 18. Affect and environment in contemporary ecopoetics Margaret Ronda; 19. Contemporary crisis fictions: twenty-first century disaffection Emily Horton; 20. Shiny happy imperialism: an affective exploration of 'ways of life' in the war on terror Amira Jarmakani; 21. The digital's amodal affect Andrew Murphie; 22. Digital special affects: on exhilaration and the STUN in CGI blockbuster films Eric Jenkins; 23. Cartesian affect Claire Colebrook.

'A seminal body of meticulous, informative, and deftly presented scholarship, Affect and Literature is an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended addition to community and academic library Literary Criticism & Theory collections and supplemental curriculum reading lists.' Jim Cox, The Midwest Book Review