ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter begins by locating the volume in the “affective turn,” the recent growth of interest in emotion across the humanities as well as the social and psychological sciences. The next section addresses the difficulty of defining emotion and related terms, focusing particularly on the different ways in which affect is understood in the two main theoretical orientations—affective science and affect theory. Having begun with the ways in which theories of emotion and affect contribute to thinking about literature, the authors turn to the ways in which the study of literature may contribute to our understanding of emotion. In connection with this, the third section analyzes parts of Apollonius’s Argonautica and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. On the basis of these analyses, it articulates several principles of emotion processing. The final section explains the structure of the volume.
