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(2017) The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism, Dordrecht, Springer.
This chapter explores how generically distinct affordances for narrative eliciting and shaping of affect in epic, romance, and the novel diversely connect affect's disruptive capacities with its fostering of cognitive flexibility and sociable affections. Starting with consideration of Homer's understanding of sense (noos) and the Mahabharata's alignment of in-group affective exclusivity with shamelessness, the essay then explores how Chrétien de Troyes draws on Pauline distinctions between "letter" and 'spirit" to chart affect's possible redemptive agency in ways that other writers of medieval romance develop. By contrast, Henry Fielding, unable to rely on the theistic-metaphysical faith that informs medieval romance, communicates the actuality and goodness of ethical sociality largely through making the presence of affective insensibility felt. Jane Austen in Mansfield Park brings Fielding's technique into indirect free style narration by making inescapable to the attentive reader the sense of all that Mary Crawford is insensible of. Similar indirection characterizes the contemporary Vietnamese novelist Huong Thu Duong, who links the revolutionary state's ideological, institutional blunting of affect to analogous blunting in pre-revolutionary, largely Confucian acculturation. In doing so, she subjects the self-congratulatory claims of the Communist ruling class to withering irony.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-63303-9_16
Full citation:
Wehrs, D. R. (2017)., Narrative and affect in epic, romance, and the novel, in T. Blake (ed.), The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 413-449.
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