ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the affective experience of reading Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl during seasonal depression. The approach draws on Matthew Ratcliffe's account of mood as well as enactive and New Materialist perspectives, bringing together the material forces of weather, human embodiment, and literature. The chapter demonstrates how descriptive and narrative techniques, such as kinaesthetic and spatial language, generate bodily feelings of tension, weight, and constraint, amplifying the experiential patterns of seasonal mood. This intentionally affective argument develops a nuanced sense of the material dynamics of bodily reading.
