ABSTRACT
Prescriptive literature refers to various kinds of materials, like childrearing manuals or manners books, that seek to guide behaviour, often explicitly including emotional standards. Prescriptive materials expand in modern societies, with rising literacy and a growing range of experts, but they exist in other periods, as with Confucian writings in China. The materials can be very important in showing emotional values and points of change, including shifts in vocabulary. They also require careful interpretation, particularly in terms of social class bias or degrees of readership interest. Properly used, however, they provide important entry to various aspects of the history of emotion.
