Short description:

This is a crucial guide to the ways in which new, interdisciplinary understandings of emotion and affect - in fields from neuroscience to social theory - are changing the study of literature and of the ways those new understandings are impacted by work on literature also.

Long description:

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion shows how the "affective turn" in the humanities applies to literary studies. Deftly combining the scientific elements with the literary, the book provides a theoretical and topical introduction to reading literature and emotion.

Looking at a variety of formats, including novels, drama, film, graphic fiction, and lyric poetry, the book also includes focus on specific authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. The volume introduces the theoretical groundwork, covering such categories as affect theory, affective neuroscience, cognitive science, evolution, and history of emotions. It examines the range of emotions that play a special role in literature, including happiness, fear, aesthetic delight, empathy, and sympathy, as well as aspects of literature (style, narrative voice, and others) that bear on emotional response. Finally, it explores ethical and political concerns that are often intertwined with emotional response, including racism, colonialism, disability, ecology, gender, sexuality, and trauma.

This is a crucial guide to the ways in which new, interdisciplinary understandings of emotion and affect?in fields from neuroscience to social theory?are changing the study of literature and of the ways those new understandings are impacted by work on literature also.

Table of Contents:

Introduction. Literary Feelings: Understanding Emotions  Part 1 Theoretical Perspectives  1. Affective Neuroscience: The Symbiosis of Scientific and Literary Knowledge  2. Affect Theory  3. Cognitive Linguistics: A Perspective on Emotion in Literature  4. Cognitive Science: Literary Emotions from Appraisal to Embodiment  5. Embodiment: Embodied Simulation and Emotional Engagement with Literary Characters  6. Empirical Approaches to Studying Emotion in Literature: The Case of Gender  7. Evolution: How Evolved Emotions Work in Literary Meaning  8. The History of Emotions and Literature  9. Philosophy, Literature, and Emotion  Part 2 Emotions of Literature  10. Aesthetic Emotions  11. Paradoxes of Literary Emotion: Simulation and The Zh?o Orphan  12. Sympathy and Empathy  13. Tragedy and Comedy: Emotional Tears and Trust in King Lear and Cymbeline  Part 3 Literature and Emotion in the World  14. Colonialism and Postcolonialism  15. Disability, "Enslavement," and Slavery: Affective Historicism and Fletcher and Masssinger?s A Very Woman  16. Ecology and Emotion: Feeling Narrative Environments  17. Morals: The Ethical Gangster  18. Gender, Emotion, Literature: "No Woman?s Heart" in Shakespeare?s Twelfth Night  19. Race and Ethnicity  20. Sexuality  21. Trauma and Its Future: Re-Visiting Aesthetic Form Debates  Part 4 Elements of Literary Structure and Experience  22. Authors: Cognitive Patterns and Individual Creativity  23. Character and Emotion in Fiction  24. Language, Style, and Texture  25. Narrative and Plot: Unreliable Feelings and the Risks of Surprise  26. Readers  27. Social Reception  28. Stories: Particular Causes and Universal Genres  Part 5 Modes of Literature  29. Drama: Feeling Out Loud in Shakespearean Apostrophe and the History of Emotions  30. Film: The Affective Specificity of Audiovisual Media  31. Graphic Fiction: BIPOC Teen Comics  32. Lyric  33. Prose Fiction  Part 6 Literary Examples  34. Geoffrey Chaucer  35. William Shakespeare: Anxieties About Trust in The Tempest  36. Jane Austen and the Emotion of Love  37. Virginia Woolf?s Development of a Sociology of Emotion in the Composition of The Years (1937)

38. Helon Habila: Structural Helplessness and the Quest for Hope in Oil on Water

39. Viet Thanh Nguyen: Navigating Anger and Empathy in The Sympathizer