Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice

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).

• 1. Introduction: A Feel for the Text, Stephen Ahern.- Part I Feeling Early Modern.- 2. The Body in Wonder: Affective Suspension and Medieval Queer Futurity, Wan-Chuan Kao.- 3. (Non-)Belief in Things: Affect Theory and A New Literary Materialism, Neil Vallelly.- 4. Semblances of Affect in the Early English Novel: Narrating Intensity, Joel P. Sodano.- Part II Affective Transmissions, Romantic to Victorian.- 5. Reading and the Sociality of Disappointing Affects in Jane Austen, Carmen Faye Mathes.- 6. Shame and its Affects: The Form–Content Implosion of Shelley’s The Cenci, Merrilees Roberts.- 7. Bodily Sympathy, Affect, and Victorian Sensation Fiction, Tara MacDonald.- 8. Feeling Other(s): Dracula and the Ethics of Unmanageable Affect, Kimberly O’Donnell.- Part III Modernist Contingencies: Engaging the Ineffable.- 9. Glad Animals: Speed, Affect, and Modern Literature, Katherine G. Sutherland.- 10. Senses without Names: Affective Becomings in William Faulkner and Carson McCullers, Jill Marsden.- Part IV Bodies Write Back: Attending to Affect in Contemporary Writing.- 11. Invisible Memories: Black Feminist Literature and its Affective Flights, Jamie Rogers.- 12. On Good Listening, Postcritique, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Affective Testimony, Tobias Skiveren.- 13. Feeling Nature, Reconsidered: Ecocriticism, Affect, and the Case of H is for Hawk, Lisa Ottum.

“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)