Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion', disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools - poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities - to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders. Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race and sex disgust. Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour - and, somewhat surprisingly, it must be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe.

What did it mean to be happy in early modern Europe? Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture includes essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in the Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth, solidarity, and tranquillity. Methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary, these essays draw from the history of emotions, affect theory and the contemporary social and cognitive sciences to reveal rich and sustained cultural attention in the early modern period to these positive feelings. The book also highlights culturally distinct negotiations of the problematic binary between what constitutes positive and negative emotions. A comprehensive introduction and afterword open multiple paths for research into the histories of good feeling and their significances for understanding present constructions of happiness and wellbeing. -- .

The only book to take a really broad look at literature and emotion from a variety of perspectives including neuroscience Section on theory introduces the more complex areas of affect theory and cognitive science so people can understand throughout the book Looks at a wide variety of literature but also features commonly studied writers such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen and Woolf