Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature

Afterlives of the Nightingale’s Song

Marion A. Wells

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031277207
• eBook ISBN: 9783031277214
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: Literature

Drawing both on historical accounts of the emotions and on contemporary affect theory, this book explores the intersection of social constructions of sex and gender with the development of norms for emotive speech in literary texts from the classical to the early modern periods. More specifically, the book argues that the influential Stoic theory of the prepassions (as distinct from the passions proper) resonates richly with recent work on affect, emphasizing in similar ways the role of embodied feelings that may exceed available linguistic norms as well as challenging gendered emotion scripts.  From the tragic Stoicism of Virgil's Aeneid to Chaucer's Stoic-Petrarchan Griselda and the Stoic-inflected attitudes reflected in the work of seventeenth century poet Mary Carey, the Stoic view of the emotions as test-cases for a moralized conception of masculine coherence conflicts with a fluid affective model of feeling that challenges the ideal of emotional self-containment.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. From Passive Matter to Embodied Affects: Gendering Emotions in the Classical Tradition
• 3. Toward an Early Modern Affect Theory: Christian Stoicism and the Augustinian Will in Medieval and Early Modern Thought
• 4. The Nightingale’s Song: Weaving Affects in Virgil’s Aeneid from the Trojan Women to Euryalus’s Mother
• 5. “Though Me Were Looth”: Translating Affect and the Maternal Body in Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale”
• 6. “When You Are Gentle”: Emotional Exercitives and Affective Injustice in Taming of the Shrew
• 7. The Tears of Rachel: Lament and Affective Improvisation in Mary Carey’s Life Narrative and Poetry
• 8. Reflections on Everyday Affective Injustice
• Back Matter