Introduction / Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi -- Part I. Embodying the political -- Speak what we feel: sympathy and statecraft / Amanda Bailey -- Affective entanglements and alternative histories / Mario DiGangi -- Part II. Affective ecologies and environments -- Weird Otium / Julian Yates -- Self-killing and the matter of affect in Bacon and Spinoza / Drew Daniel -- Thinking feeling / Benedict S. Robinson -- Crocodile tears: affective fallacies old and new / Joseph Campana -- Part III. Affective form -- The feel of the slaughterhouse: affective temporalities and Marlowe's The massacre at Paris / Patricia Cahill -- Spenser's envious history / David Landreth -- Affective contagion on the early modern stage / Evelyn Tribble -- Afterword: thinking about affect and emotion in Julius Caesar / Gail Kern Paster.
Summary:
The first book to put contemporary affect theory into conversation with early modern studies, this volume demonstrates how questions of affect illuminate issues of cognition, political agency, historiography, and scientific thought in early modern literature and culture. Engaging various historical and theoretical perspectives, the essays in this volume bring affect to bear on early modern representations of bodies, passions, and social relations by exploring: the role of embodiment in political subjectivity and action; the interactions of human and non-human bodies within ecological systems; and the social and physiological dynamics of theatrical experience. Examining the complexly embodied experiences of leisure, sympathy, staged violence, courtiership, envy, suicide, and many other topics, the contributors open up new ways of understanding how Renaissance writers thought about the capacities, pleasures, and vulnerabilities of the human body. .
Series:
Palgrave studies in affect theory and literary criticism
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.