Gender, Affect, and Emotion from Classical to Early Modern Literature - Afterlives of the Nightingale's Song

Drawing both on historical accounts of the emotions and on contemporary affect theory, this book explores the intersection of social constructions of sex and gender with the development of norms for emotive speech in literary texts from the classical to the early modern periods. More specifically, the book argues that the influential Stoic theory of the prepassions (as distinct from the passions proper) resonates richly with recent work on affect, emphasizing in similar ways the role of embodied feelings that may exceed available linguistic norms as well as challenging gendered emotion scripts.  From the tragic Stoicism of Virgil's Aeneid to Chaucer's Stoic-Petrarchan Griselda and the Stoic-inflected attitudes reflected in the work of seventeenth century poet Mary Carey, the Stoic view of the emotions as test-cases for a moralized conception of masculine coherence conflicts with a fluid affective model of feeling that challenges the ideal of emotional self-containment.


Marion Wells is a Professor in the English Department at Middlebury College, USA, where she is also affiliated with the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Program.  She has a BA in Classics and Modern Languages from Oxford University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Her areas of special interest include early modern English and Italian Literature, classical literature, gender studies, and the history of medicine. She teaches a wide range of courses at Middlebury, including introductory courses in English literature, advanced courses in early modern literature, and courses focusing on the intersection of literary and gender studies. Previous publications include The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance (2007) and a variety of articles on early modern and classical literature.