Approaches to Emotion in Middle English Literature

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This groundbreaking book explores key methods for investigating emotions in medieval literary texts, drawing on psychological theory, research in the history of emotions and close critical reading to uncover the emotional repertoire in play in English literary culture between 1200-1500. The book comprehensively illuminates medieval philosophical and physiological theorisations of emotion, closely bound up with cognitive processes. It investigates the changing lexis for emotion in Middle English, examining how translations from French affect the ways in which feelings are imagined. It takes a detailed look at bodily affect, both involuntary displays and deliberate gesture, and shows how performativity and performance become interlinked as more sophisticated models of selfhood emerge. Concepts of interiority and the public persona complicate the changing modes through which feeling is expressed. Literary texts are pre-eminently devices for producing emotion of various kinds, the book proposes new ways of tracing how authors built techniques for eliciting emotions into their narratives and their effects on their audiences. By the end of the medieval period, two vital developments had expanded the possibility for varied and complex emotional expression in texts: the development of the long-form romance, encouraged by the advent of printing, and the concept of auto-fiction: new possibilities emerged for authors to write the emotional self. Through its comprehensive account of emotions in the medieval period, Approaches to emotion in Middle English literature explores how literary texts educated and informed their audiences about changing ways to be human in medieval England.