ABSTRACT
My original idea for this chapter was to attempt a consideration of affect through history. I thought I would be able to track historical differences in one or two affects like 'love' or 'fear', perhaps, comparing the expression of emotions found in texts from the medieval, Renaissance, eighteenth and nineteenth century right up to the present psychoanalytic era. I had wondered, for instance, what had been the emotional experience at a public execution in any of these eras, and how had emotions experienced by subjects at such an event changed over the centuries. At a more local and contemporary level, I was interested in the passage in Nick Homby's novel High Fidelity (Homby, 1996) where the narrator ponders how his father felt, a generation earlier, about sex, love, and the attendant anxieties and emotions, compared with what the narrator experiences in the late 1980s.
