Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice

Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice develops new approaches to reading literature that are informed by the insights of scholars working in affect studies across many disciplines, with essays that consider works of fiction, drama, poetry and memoir ranging from the medieval to the postmodern. While building readings of representative texts, contributors reflect on the value of affect theory to literary critical practice, asking: what explanatory power is affect theory affording me here as a critic? what can the insights of the theory help me do with a text? Contributors work to incorporate lines of theory not always read together, accounting for the affective intensities that circulate through texts and readers and tracing the operations of affectively charged social scripts. Drawing variously on queer, feminist and critical race theory and informed by ecocritical and new materialist sensibilities, essays in the volume share a critical practice founded in an ethics ofrelation and contribute to an emerging moment of postcritique.

Auteur

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, 17701830 (ed.)(2013) and Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 16801810 (2007).

Texte du rabat

Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice develops new approaches to reading literature that are informed by the insights of scholars working in affect studies across many disciplines, with essays that consider works of fiction, drama, poetry and memoir ranging from the medieval to the postmodern. While building readings of representative texts, contributors reflect on the value of affect theory to literary critical practice, asking: what explanatory power is affect theory affording me here as a critic? what can the insights of the theory help me do with a text? Contributors work to incorporate lines of theory not always read together, accounting for the affective intensities that circulate through texts and readers and tracing the operations of affectively charged social scripts. Drawing variously on queer, feminist and critical race theory and informed by ecocritical and new materialist sensibilities, essays in the volume share a critical practice founded in an ethics of relation and contribute to an emerging moment of postcritique.

Résumé

Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice *develops new approaches to reading literature that are informed by the insights of scholars working in affect studies across many disciplines, with essays that consider works of fiction, drama, poetry and memoir ranging from the medieval to the postmodern. While building readings of representative texts, contributors reflect on the value of affect theory to literary critical practice, asking: what explanatory power is affect theory affording me here as a critic? what can the insights of the theory help me *do with a text? Contributors work to incorporate lines of theory not always read together, accounting for the affective intensities that circulate through texts and readers and tracing the operations of affectively charged social scripts. Drawing variously on queer, feminist and critical race theory and informed by ecocritical and new materialist sensibilities, essays in the volume share a critical practice founded in an ethics of relation and contribute to an emerging postcritical moment.

Contenu
1. Introduction: A Feel for the Text, Stephen AhernPart I Feeling Early Modern2. The Body in Wonder: Affective Suspension and Medieval Queer Futurity, Wan-Chuan Kao3. (Non-)Belief in Things: Affect Theory and A New Literary Materialism, Neil Vallelly4. Semblances of Affect in the Early English Novel: Narrating Intensity, Joel P. SodanoPart II Affective Transmissions, Romantic to Victorian5. Reading and the Sociality of Disappointing Affects in Jane Austen, Carmen Faye Mathes6. Shame and its Affects: The FormContent Implosion of Shelley's The Cenci, *Merrilees Roberts7. Bodily Sympathy, Affect, and Victorian Sensation Fiction, Tara MacDonald8. Feeling Other(s): *Dracula and the Ethics of Unmanageable Affect, Kimberly O'DonnellPart III Modernist Contingencies: Engaging the Ineffable9. Glad Animals: Speed, Affect, and Modern Literature, Katherine G. Sutherland10. Senses without Names: Affective Becomings in William Faulkner and Carson McCullers, Jill MarsdenPart IV Bodies Write Back: Attending to Affect in Contemporary Writing11. Invisible Memories: Black Feminist Literature and its Affective Flights, Jamie Rogers12. On Good Listening, Postcritique, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Affective Testimony, Tobias Skiveren13. Feeling Nature, Reconsidered: Ecocriticism, Affect, and the Case of H is for Hawk, Lisa Ottum.