This volume presents new work by scholars working at the intersection of British Romanticism and affect studies. Each essay takes a different approach to affect and emotion, from a piece on Joanna Baillie’s passion plays, co-written by a literary scholar and a cognitive psychologist, to a piece that utilizes affect theory and rhythmic studies in a reading of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This volume does not propose a single definition of “affect,” but all of the essays share the conviction that the kind of interdisciplinary work demanded by affect studies is beneficial to both Romantic studies and affect studies. Much more than a passing trend, affect studies has transformed the study of emotion for a generation of scholars.
Abstract
This essay examines the cognitive underpinnings of affect circulation in the poetry of Coleridge and Keats, poets who sought to shape the reading experiences of their contemporary and future audiences. Both poets utilized the automaticity inherent in reading popular genres like the Gothic and Romance, as they immerse their readers in a flood of sensation. Yet, interruptions to the narrative flow complicate moments of composition and reading, ultimately highlighting a complex cognitive and affective work happening through passive reading.
Abstract
William Blake’s perpetually protean Marriage of Heaven and Hell has proven somewhat elusive for those seeking to articulate “what” the work means. Given its unusual form/s (organized along both verbal and visual axes), its visionary commitments (evoked through its apocalyptic imagery), and its intertextual engagements (from Aristotle and Jesus through Milton to Swedenborg [Blake’s primary focus]), one cannot arrive at a singular textual meaning. However, when one asks a different question—“How does the text make its meaning?”—the dynamic aims of the work do emerge.
Sharing Contagion: Sympathetic Curiosity and Social Emotion Regulation in Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort
M. Soledad Caballero, Aimee KnupskyAbstract
In her 1798 “Introductory Discourse,” Joanna Baillie argues that sympathetic curiosity is what makes us care about others in the world. In contemporary parlance, Baillie wants to use sympathetic curiosity for “emotion regulation,” a concept used in socio-cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In this essay, we analyze Baillie’s play De Monfort to critique models of emotion regulation by 1) positioning sympathetic curiosity as a tool for emotional education, 2) disentangling affect, emotion, and cognition, and 3) emphasizing the social in the management of emotion.
“[H]is mind was … my disease”: Viral Affect in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock
Jonas CopeAbstract
This essay argues that recent criticism in affect theory emphasizing the “strictly biological portion of emotion” offers a new interpretive window into a much-neglected Gothic novel by an important though still relatively unknown writer.
Abstract
Taking as its main focus Shelley’s lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, this essay examines the Romantic treatment of feeling as a kind of affective ecology sustained by love. The poem reconstitutes feeling, not as it indicates a subject formed by Enlightenment notions of words or looks, but as an unrestrained jouissance that constitutes the event of feeling itself. This event shatters the subject so that, as if to tarry with a Jupiterian desire to conscript meaning, the subject can feel its truth.