ABSTRACT
This article canvasses some of the most significant moments in the Western philosophical tradition of the relation of emotion to literature. Beginning with the apparent debate between Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece, we move to the emergence of expression theories of art in response to Romanticism, focusing especially on the work of R. G. Collingwood. Resistance from the New Critics in the form of the so-called Affective Fallacy caused a momentary hiatus in the discussion of the relation of emotion to literature, but as philosophers in general became increasingly interested in the emotions, aestheticians in particular followed suit as exemplified in the work of Kendall Walton and Jenefer Robinson, among others.
