1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion

    514 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    Introduction. Literary Feelings: Understanding Emotions

    Patrick Colm Hogan and Bradley J. Irish

    Part 1

    Theoretical Perspectives

    1. Affective Neuroscience: The Symbiosis of Scientific and Literary Knowledge

    Laura Otis

    2. Affect Theory

    Wendy J. Truran

    3. Cognitive Linguistics: A Perspective on Emotion in Literature

    Zoltán Kövecses

    4. Cognitive Science: Literary Emotions from Appraisal to Embodiment

    Marco Caracciolo

    5. Embodiment: Embodied Simulation and Emotional Engagement with Literary Characters

    Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski and Vittorio Gallese

    6. Empirical Approaches to Studying Emotion in Literature: The Case of Gender

    Chantelle Ivanski, Marta M. Maslej, and Raymond A. Mar

    7. Evolution: How Evolved Emotions Work in Literary Meaning

    Joseph Carroll

    8. The History of Emotions and Literature

    Andrew Lynch

    9. Philosophy, Literature, and Emotion

    Noël Carroll

    Part 2

    Emotions of Literature

    10. Aesthetic Emotions

    Sibylle Baumbach

    11. Paradoxes of Literary Emotion: Simulation and The Zhào Orphan

    Patrick Colm Hogan

    12. Sympathy and Empathy

    Derek Matravers

    13. Tragedy and Comedy: Emotional Tears and Trust in King Lear and Cymbeline

    Lalita Pandit Hogan

    Part 3

    Literature and Emotion in the World

    14. Colonialism and Postcolonialism

    Suzanne Keen

    15. Disability, "Enslavement," and Slavery: Affective Historicism and

    Fletcher and Masssinger’s A Very Woman

    David Houston Wood

    16. Ecology and Emotion: Feeling Narrative Environments

    Alexa Weik von Mossner

    17. Morals: The Ethical Gangster

    Blakey Vermeule

    18. Gender, Emotion, Literature: "No Woman’s Heart" in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

    Cora Fox

    19. Race and Ethnicity

    Christopher González

    20. Sexuality

    Tiffany Diana Ball

    21. Trauma and Its Future: Re-Visiting Aesthetic Form Debates

    E. Ann Kaplan

    Part 4

    Elements of Literary Structure and Experience

    22. Authors: Cognitive Patterns and Individual Creativity

    Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas

    23. Character and Emotion in Fiction

    Keith Oatley

    24. Language, Style, and Texture

    Peter Stockwell

    25. Narrative and Plot: Unreliable Feelings and the Risks of Surprise

    Vera Tobin

    26. Readers

    Richard J. Gerrig

    27. Social Reception

    Bradley J. Irish

    28. Stories: Particular Causes and Universal Genres

    Patrick Colm Hogan

    Part 5

    Modes of Literature

    29. Drama: Feeling Out Loud in Shakespearean Apostrophe and the History of Emotions

    Gail Kern Paster

    30. Film: The Affective Specificity of Audiovisual Media

    Jens Eder

    31. Graphic Fiction: BIPOC Teen Comics

    Frederick Luis Aldama

    32. Lyric

    John Brenkman

    33. Prose Fiction

    Bartosz Stopel

    Part 6

    Literary Examples

    34. Geoffrey Chaucer

    Stephanie Downes

    35. William Shakespeare: Anxieties About Trust in The Tempest

    Lalita Pandit Hogan

    36. Jane Austen and the Emotion of Love

    Keith Oatley

    37. Virginia Woolf’s Development of a Sociology of Emotion

    in the Composition of The Years (1937)

    Emily Ridge

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

    Donald R. Wehrs

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

    Sue J. Kim

     

    Biography

    Patrick Colm Hogan is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut, USA.

    Bradley J. Irish is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, USA.

    Lalita Pandit Hogan is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, USA.