ABSTRACT
This chapter explores social issues bearing on authorship, the author and his or her work as situated at a specific cultural and historical nexus. The history of emotions encompasses a range of distinct historical and psychological hypotheses, often differing in their degree of adherence to cultural constructivism, the idea that emotions are not pre-given biologically but "constructed" by cultures. Though emotion history might in principle treat any component of an emotion episode, it has often devoted particular attention to modulation. A related concept has been developed and extended by writers in literary study, some of whom have considered the more complex relation between emotion norms and scripts. Scripts are the cognitive structures that define standard ways in which certain types of events unfold. In practice, the history of emotion has tended to focus on a few areas of research and has rarely done so with explicit attention to the analysis of the components defining an emotion episode.
