Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture

By Manchester University Press

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526137159

Book preview

Notes on contributors

Cora Fox is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, where alongside her research in early modern culture she has developed interdisciplinary programming and curricular initiatives in the health humanities. She is the author of Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (Palgrave, 2009) and co-edited (with Barbara Weiden Boyd) Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition (MLA, 2010). She is completing a monograph on fantasies of happiness, well-being, and healthy communities in early modern English literature.

Timothy Hampton is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2010) and Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work (Zone Books, 2019). A new study, Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History, is forthcoming from Zone Books in 2021.

Lalita Pandit Hogan is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Affiliate faculty of the South Asia Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her more recent research has focused on emotion studies and cognitive neuroscience, and she has published articles and book chapters on Shakespeare, Goethe, south Asian authors, Hindi cinema (some of these adaptations of Shakespeare), and comparative aesthetics. She is co-editor and contributing author of four books published by university presses, and three special issues of journals, one of which is the award-winning Shakespeare in the Age of Cognitive Neuroscience (College Literature 33.1, 2006). She is the author of A Country Without Borders: Stories and Poems of Kashmir (2Leaf Press, 2017, distributed by University of Chicago Press). She edits (with three others) a special series on Cognitive Approaches to Culture at Ohio State University Press.

Patrick Colm Hogan is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut, where he is a member of the English Department, the Program in Cognitive Science, and the Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, several of which treat Shakespeare, including What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His recent work includes Personal Identity and Literature (Routledge, 2019) and Style in Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Bradley J. Irish is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he specializes in sixteenth-century English literature and culture. His first monograph was Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (Northwestern University Press, 2018); his second, Shakespeare and Disgust: A Study in Dramatic Language, will be published by The Arden Shakespeare in 2022. His articles have appeared in journals such as Renaissance Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Drama, and Modern Philology.

Ullrich Langer is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent publications include Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Les Remontrances (XVIe –XVIIIe siècles): Textes et commentaires, co-edited with Paul-Alexis Mellet (Garnier, 2021). His current research concerns the ethics and rhetoric of disagreement in the Ancien Régime, and poetic confrontations with the finite, from Virgil to Baudelaire.

Cassie M. Miura is Assistant Teaching Professor in the division of Culture, Arts, and Communication at the University of Washington Tacoma. She is currently working on a monograph titled The Humor of Skepticism: Therapeutic Laughter from Montaigne to Milton. She has published in Early Modern Culture and has essays appearing in Shakespeare and Montaigne (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and Forming Sleep: Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance (Penn State University Press, 2020).

Ian Frederick Moulton is President’s Professor of English and Cultural History in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. He has published widely on the representation of gender and sexuality in early modern European literature. His books include Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century: The Popularization of Romance (Palgrave, 2014).

Eonjoo Park is Assistant Professor of English at Jeonbuk National University in South Korea. She has published on topics ranging from gerontological discourses and fellow-feeling in King Lear, anger and revenge in Titus Andronicus, wonder and sympathy in Oroonoko, as well as violence and commitment in the work of Edward Bond. Currently, she is working on two projects: the first on old age in Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah and the second on re-reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam as a revenge play.

Michael C. Schoenfeldt is the John Knott Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is editor of the Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Blackwell, 2006) and John Donne in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He is currently writing a book entitled Reading Seventeenth-Century Poetry and researching pain and pleasure in early modern England.

Richard Strier, Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English, Divinity, and the College of the University of Chicago, is the author of The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (University of California Press, 1995); and Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1983). He has co-edited a number of interdisciplinary collections including Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Recent and forthcoming essays are on Donne's erotic lyrics, New Historicism and formalism, and King Lear.

Leila Watkins received her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan in 2014. Her research explores why early modern English readers and writers believed verse to be a uniquely effective form of emotional management, or consolation, and how they understood it to work. She is broadly interested in the history of emotion, poetry and poetics, religion, and community formation in early modern England. She currently works in development and communications at CollegeSpring, a San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit that promotes equitable college access for students who are historically underrepresented in higher education.

Paul Joseph Zajac is an Assistant Professor of English at McDaniel College. His articles on early modern literature have appeared in Philological Quarterly, Studies in Philology, Studies in English Literature, and English Literary Renaissance. He is currently writing a book-length study of Reformation concepts of contentment in English Renaissance literature.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our editors, our anonymous reviewers, and the staff at MUP for ushering this book into print during a pandemic. We know that it cannot have been easy to focus on this project in the middle of it all and we are grateful.

We would also like to thank our contributors for their good humor and patience along what turned out to be a fairly long road to publication. We are proud and honored to have our names associated with yours.

The idea for this volume arose, as so many do, from a terrific seminar at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) in 2015, although only a few of those seminarians ended up as contributors to the volume. We, the editors, also collaborated for the first time at the SAA, so it is important to offer that community and the people who hold it together our thanks.

Some of the work on emotion carried out by Bradley Irish and Cora Fox was also supported through the Fellows program of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University.

Finally, we owe gratitude to our families and friends—those who gave us time and space, and who cultivated our own positive emotions through the struggles inherent in extended scholarly work.

Introduction

Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura

At the center of the Garden of Adonis, in the Book of Chastity and at the heart of Spenser's great encyclopedic poem of Renaissance culture The Faerie Queene, Pleasure is born. The child spends her days playing in this locus amoenus ‘fraught / With pleasures manifold’, along with Amoret, the allegorical figure for the female beloved in traditions of courtly love and romance: ‘Pleasure, that doth both gods and men aggrate, / Pleasure, the daughter of Cupid and Psyche late’ (3.6.Summary and 50.8–9).¹ In Spenser's allegory, pleasure is represented as foundational to creation. The garden is the privileged home of Genius and the nursery of souls after they have been harvested by Time and before they are reborn into their new forms. Pleasure is the child—allegorically and intertextually—of Cupid and Psyche's marriage in Apuleius’ Golden Ass, and in referencing that tale, Spenser places his poem in dialogue with a long tradition of Platonic commentary that sought to reconcile human suffering with the pleasurable aspects of divine creation. Pleasure, in fact, and particularly the positive emotions connected to romantic love and marriage, is insistently at stake in Spenser's allegorical exploration of his own cultural moment.² And yet, until recently, positive emotions have received less attention in studies of Spenser and other early modern writers, even though, as the Garden of Adonis emblematizes, they are essential to this culture's ethical and theological discursive contexts.³

This volume addresses such neglect of the ‘positive’ in literary studies of the early modern period, bringing together scholarship on various kinds of pleasurable feelings and their representations in European literary texts from the end of the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries. While the methods of the essays collected vary widely, and many of them productively undercut an easy distinction between categories of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions, they share a commitment to exploring the significances and contours of pleasurable feeling in early modern Europe.

Positive emotions, historical texts

In drawing attention to positive emotions, this collection participates in two larger intellectual projects and interdisciplinary scholarly movements. The first is what Sara Ahmed has termed a ‘happiness turn’ in contemporary affect theory, reflecting a developing popular cultural interest in happiness and well-being.⁴ The ‘happiness turn’ is an expansion and intensification of the much larger ‘affective turn’ in the sciences and humanities, in which scholars from diverse disciplines have fixed their attention on matters of emotion, affect, and feeling. The volume also participates in a nascent movement to recalibrate historical studies of emotions, which have suffered from what Darrin McMahon has called a ‘negative bias’.⁵ McMahon suggests a number of broad contributing causes for this bias, including what psychologists have argued is the human propensity to be more affected by and remember negative stimuli, but most of his causes are rooted more in disciplinary history than in innate or existential human suffering and despair.⁶ In the broadest sense, negative emotions may also have been an initial focus in literary studies of feeling because rhetorics of emotion inherited from classical sources and bolstered by the Reformation coalesce around moments of ritual mourning or anger: the set piece of the melancholic courtier or the rageful revenger, rather than steady states of well-being or joy. While it would be foolish to attempt to suggest that an empirical account of European literature would find more negative than positive emotions represented (and such an endeavor would immediately confront the ambiguity of this binary distinction), it is not a stretch to note that the most canonized literature taught in secondary and university courses tends to explore more explicitly the contours of human suffering than the experiences of joy. But happiness is there in even these cultural products, in fact, as Ahmed's work reveals, as the object of every quest, the structuring force that defines the embodied self in these narratives of unhappiness. Scholars only need to see it more clearly.⁷ Bringing together the insights of affect theory and historical studies of emotion, and accepting their challenges to the methods of literary criticism and history as well as to the archive itself, this volume represents work that seeks to reconsider which emotions matter and how they work in early modern culture.

A more particular explanation for the relative critical indifference to ‘positive’ emotional experience in literary studies of the early modern period, however, is the profound influence of New Historicism. In their authoritative volume Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson rightly identify the ‘suffering body’ as well as the ‘discursive privilege of melancholy’ as constitutive features of early modern culture.⁸ Paster's Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage and Michael Schoenfeldt's Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England both account for the ways the humoral body is embedded in an ecology that demands the management of disruptive humors.⁹ Paster focuses on the threats and excesses of the ‘wriggling’ passions of the soul, while Schoenfeldt emphasizes the inherent power of an ethics of containing those unruly passions that is central to Renaissance humanism. Such representations of the body reflect the widespread influence of Galenic humoral theory and Christian neo-Stoicism on early modern conceptions of emotion, and they have generated a rich picture of how these traditional ideas about the body defined subjectivity and embodiment in the early modern period.

Richard Strier, however, in The Unrepentant Renaissance, and a number of scholars embracing methods and theories other than those that grounded New Historicism, have begun to recuperate the positive, and they have advocated for a critical expansion beyond humoral theory as the dominant cultural model of early modern emotions.¹⁰ Critiquing what he calls the ‘new humoralism’, Strier argues, with reference to Jacob Burckhardt's seminal work on Renaissance culture, that scholarship working within the critical modes of the New Historicism needlessly ‘presents the period in dark and dour terms’.¹¹ In addition, Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis argue that a focus on the humors—the potential determinism of innate humoral dispositions, the involuntary nature of humoral flux, and a tendency to view all emotions as perturbations that must be disciplined, regulated, or treated—is aligned in many of these accounts with a version of the early modern subject that is characterized by not only its materiality, but also its lack of autonomy. They point out that ‘within this picture, human agency has almost been removed in the search for a pathologized self’.¹² The focus on humoralism has at least limited and sometimes obscured cultural sites and discourses where positive feelings are generated and maintained—such as the comedies or Epicurean philosophy—and renewed attention to positive emotions promises to open new avenues and archives in the field.

Even in work that has de-emphasized early medical discourse and the role of Galenic humoral theory, however, there is a clear prioritization of negative emotions or feelings. Scholars such as Steven Mullaney, for instance, have drawn on Raymond Williams's conception of ‘structures of feeling’ in order to better describe the affective dimensions of the Reformation and its aftermath.¹³ Here, the impulse has been to approach the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as sites of crisis and historical trauma. Mullaney, for example, highlights feelings of anxiety and alienation when he argues that Shakespeare's generation had a ‘profoundly dissociated sense of its world’ and that individuals experienced ‘a deep and daily ambivalence at the affective core of the self’.¹⁴ While there is little doubt that the early modern period witnessed intense social and political upheaval, perhaps more than other ages, there is also evidence—documented in many of the essays in this volume—to suggest that the very same historical conditions that induced fear and doubt also gave rise to a broad cultural interest in new and newly recovered approaches to therapy, consolation, and well-being.

In the field of classical studies, Ruth R. Caston and Robert A. Kaster have made a similar observation regarding scholarship on the history of emotions in ancient Greece and Rome, that ‘though the number of studies is plentiful, its range gives a lopsided impression, as if the ancients were interested in only negative emotions’.¹⁵ Their collection of essays, Hope, Joy, and Affection in the Classical World, brings together leading scholars—including Michael C.J. Putman, Margaret Graver, and Martha C. Nussbaum—to investigate the role of positive emotions in a wide range of discursive forms. The insights of that volume are especially valuable to the present work since so many early modern thinkers turned to classical antiquity in order to theorize positive emotions that are experienced in this life, as opposed to those predicted by Christian doctrine in the next. While there is a long-standing tradition of scholarship on concepts such as eudaimonia (flourishing), tranquillitas (tranquility) and constantia (constancy) which various schools of ancient philosophy aim to cultivate, Caston and Kaster are also deliberate in centering literary genres such as Roman comedy and the Greek novel as essential archives for understanding a history of positive emotions. Their project is similar to the one pursued by a number of authors in this volume, widening the intellectual history of emotions, as well as engaging a richer core of texts in the literary archive.

Although there is currently no work dedicated exclusively to positive affect and emotion in early modern Europe, scholars like Bridget Escolme have expressed ‘a desire to give pleasure equal weight with anxiety’, and The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan, contains several essays working toward this end.¹⁶ David Bragchi writes on the biblical emotions of quietness and tranquility, Sara Coodin analyzes Christian and Jewish eudaimonism, while Mary Ann Lund and Richard Chamberlain offer, respectively, treatments of happiness in Robert Burton and Hamlet. Meek and Sullivan bring to light a fuller range of emotional and affective experience by looking not only to Galenic humoral theory but also to other forms of medical, philosophical, religious, and political discourses of the period.

Alongside these varied and variously historical readings of early modern affect and emotion broadly conceived, Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi offer theoretical analyses of the convergences of the many areas of affect theory and studies of early modern literature in Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form.¹⁷ As they note in their introduction, Brian Massumi, who is widely regarded as offering the definitional account of affect for modern critical theory, develops his theory from the writings of the late seventeenth-century scholar, Baruch Spinoza. As Massumi points out, Spinoza famously defined affectus as ‘modifications of the body, whereby the active power of the said body is increased or diminished, aided, or constrained, and also the ideas of such modifications’; Spinoza's work has been elaborated by Gilles Deleuze, who argued that ‘a certain capacity for being affected corresponds to [the] degree of power’ of individual bodies.¹⁸ For Massumi, affect reflects the body's capacity to inhabit indeterminate and transitory states; this is in sharp contrast to emotion, which he sees as the individual body's qualified, temporary, and inevitably incomplete ‘capture’ of affective intensity, the ‘subjective … sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal’.¹⁹ A number of philosophers have engaged with Massumi's personal definition of affects, amplifying, rejecting, and re-orienting work on affect in the social field. In particular, scholars including Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Teresa Brennan, Kathleen Woodward, Ann Cvetkovich, Martha Nussbaum, and Sianne Ngai have developed alternative approaches to theorizing affect that explore the politics of bodies in contemporary shared life.²⁰ As Bailey and DiGangi elaborate, there is great potential in pursuing work at the intersections of early modern literary studies and the critical theory that comes out of this tradition, and a few contributors to this volume, in particular Leila Watkins and Cora Fox, offer approaches that engage directly with scholarship in this field. Bailey and DiGangi have offered an initial charge into this kind of work and this present volume further allows early modern texts to speak back to the central paradigms of the ‘positive’ in contemporary theories of affect.

Another and newer approach to reading early modern emotion that appears in some essays in this volume—particularly those by Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit Hogan—draws directly from the modern affective sciences. Like historicists, scholars working in this mode acknowledge that emotions are in large part socially constructed—that their specific meanings are functions of time and place. Yet, at the same time, these scholars also engage the wealth of modern scientific research, from fields like neuroscience and experimental psychology, that suggests evidence of transhistorical and transcultural similarity in human emotional experience. This approach risks potential controversy—and indeed, has been called into question for anachronism—but scholars utilizing this method argue that the modern affective sciences can nonetheless help elucidate the emotional experiences of centuries ago by drawing our attention to features of early modern emotionality that we might otherwise miss with a purely historicist approach.²¹

Situated within and speaking back to this exciting interdisciplinary scholarship on the biocultural history of emotion, this volume implicitly assesses early modern cultural movements in relation to modern developments in critical theory and the cognitive sciences, and while much of the scholarship on early modern affect and emotion has focused on England and English literature, the editors of this volume have tried to include also continental and classical sources and to expand the literary genres that are privileged in this work. In order to understand why tragedy has generally taken precedence over comedy or why funeral rites and mourning rituals are more frequently documented in the historical record of early civilizations, a fuller expansion, including more global literature, should be the ultimate goal for the field, and we hope this volume represents at least a small step in that direction. In addition, while some of the essays engage directly with questions of embodiment, it is clear that a next step for the field will be a more fully intersectional engagement with questions of race, ethnicity, and gender, working alongside the exciting disciplinary developments occurring in studies of Shakespeare and early modern culture more generally.²² Indeed, the realignment of scholarly focus accomplished in this volume often highlights the biopolitics of emotions and affects, and it offers a new vantage point from which to interrogate both historical and contemporary conceptions of what constitutes pleasure and who is afforded well-being and happiness.

Positive emotions in the cognitive and social sciences

As is suggested by the rich interdisciplinary work arising in Emotions History and Affect Studies, positive emotions have been the focus of important scholarly developments in the cognitive and social sciences. Psychology and the neurosciences, in particular, have been influenced by the new field of ‘positive psychology’.²³ The authors of the recent Handbook of Positive Emotions, for instance, argue that after ‘decades of neglect, psychological research on positive emotions has burgeoned within the past 20 years’.²⁴ Positive emotions have, however, for many years played a significant role in every major modern psychological theory of affect. Theories of basic emotions, for example, posit some number of discrete positive emotions, inevitably anchored by happiness/joy, but sometimes including categorizations like interest, hope, or trust.²⁵ Appraisal theories of emotion view positive affect as emerging from the series of assessments through which individuals subjectively evaluate stimuli in their environment.²⁶ And Constructivist theories, though denying the existence of ‘hard-wired’ positive emotional states, still grant a vital role in the emotion-construction process to the positive or negative valence of core affect, ‘the neurophysiological state consciously accessible as the simplest raw (nonreflective) feelings evident in moods and emotions’.²⁷ While a focus on positive emotions is indeed newer in most of these fields—developing in scholarship of the last thirty years or so—these areas of research have now developed well beyond simple distinctions between happiness and the various negative emotions that dominated this research before the present era.

There has also been increased attention to the varieties of human experience that have been characterized as ‘positive’ within psychology and the affective social sciences. In general, the experience of positive emotion used to be seen as ‘relatively undifferentiated, primarily represented by various forms of happiness, and serving fairly nonspecific adaptational functions’.²⁸ Darwin, for example, in his pioneering The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), ‘devoted separate chapters to suffering, grief, reflection/ill temper, anger, disgust/contempt, fear/surprise, and shame, but only one to unequivocally positive emotions (joy/high spirits, love, tender feelings, and devotion)’.²⁹ But scholars in the affective sciences are now exploring the unique features of many positive emotions, and a recent chapter differentiates the motivational properties and appraisal components of such feelings as happiness, pride, gratitude, interest, hope, challenge/determination, affection, compassion, awe, and tranquility.³⁰ In this sense, the modern sciences are reflecting classical and early modern practices, in which positive emotions are often disaggregated, with treatises dedicated to such specific categories as gaudium, laetitia, felicitas, or hilaritas. Overall, and particularly in the modern evolutionary studies of emotion, ‘positive emotions signal safety, cueing an individual that it is fine to roam and explore one's environment or sit quietly still without the threat of harm’; indeed, distinctive positive affective states have been thought to ‘serve a variety of adaptive functions, including rewarding success, encouraging perseverance, sustaining engagement, promoting pair-bonding, promoting social responsibility, and more’.³¹ (For example: enthusiasm is theorized to be associated with the acquisition of material resources, sexual desire with the attraction of mates, and pride with the increase of status among peer groups.)³² In addition, research suggests that positive affect is crucial to flourishing, at both the social and personal levels.³³ Sentiments like gratitude and love, ‘at their core, are critical elements in initiating, building, and maintaining our interpersonal bonds’, while positive emotion has also been linked to numerous health and well-being benefits.³⁴

While this research has provided new ways of measuring the flourishing of individuals, communities, and nations—indicated by the growth of well-being indices, for example—there has also been a response from cultural critics and philosophers that points out the limitations of these concepts and their potentially harmful, aggressive, or politically quietist effects. Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism and Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness both account for the ways twenty-first-century experiences of happiness or other positive states can be exclusionary, offering social attachments for particular selves that are not available or not constituted for others.³⁵ Berlant traces the cruel ways contemporary neoliberal structures generate false optimism, holding out the promise of a deterministic ‘good life’ that leaves some persons profoundly disaffected and alienated. Ahmed focuses on the ways happiness operates as a promised reward for living a particular way, a narrow definition that excludes and stigmatizes ‘affect aliens’ and other unhappy outsiders. Positive emotions in these accounts are used to justify and perpetuate oppression, and these works have offered new vocabularies to Cultural Studies for reading how these processes work in both contemporary and historical texts and media. As Berlant and Sianne Ngai point out in their recent issue of Critical Inquiry focused on comedy, ‘Comedy [and by this they mean both the aesthetic form and the positively valenced experience of everyday life] helps us test or figure out what it means to say us. Always crossing lines, it helps us figure out what lines we desire or can bear.’³⁶ They make the argument that comedy as a mode and a pleasure creates particularly unpredictable and political affective attachments, that comedy both mobilizes and elucidates strong and aggressive social responses, responses that can be unethical or un-empathetic. Their work, in fact, brings to the present a paradigm quite similar to Renaissance notions of festivity, the carnivalesque, and misrule that were made central to critical discussions in the field by Mikhail Bakhtin and scholars of early modern England like Leah Marcus, who elucidated the politics of festivity and ‘positive’ modes of literature in The Politics of Mirth.³⁷ Both the work of these scholars of early modern festivity and this recent work on the contemporary politics of comedy reveal the ways positive emotions tend to be entangled in highly complex negotiations of power, both in individual bonds and smaller social groups, and particularly in human ties facilitated or generated by state institutions, discourses, and public rituals.

Scholarship in the contemporary affective sciences has also pointed to the problematics of the binary between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, and in this collection there is regular attention to how positive emotions interact with their non-positive counterparts—via discussion of ambivalence, mixed emotions, and how positive emotions may be experienced in negative contexts (and vice versa). This is not to dilute the focus on positive emotions, but rather to highlight one of their crucial features. In general, in psychological research positive emotions are ones ‘that subjectively feel good and often serve more appetitive [and approach] motivational functions’, whereas negative emotions are those ‘that subjectively feel bad and often serve self-protective [and withdrawal] motivational functions’.³⁸ But, as both general experience and laboratory findings reveal, there are vital exceptions to these hedonic valence and motivational alignments. Depending on context, for example, contemporary emotion scientists point out that sadness, fear, and anger can all feel subjectively good—they become, in the moment, a kind of positive emotion. Similarly, there is ample evidence that the generally negative emotion anger is associated with approach motivation, whereas the positive emotion tranquility seems to have little approach component.³⁹ Indeed, empirical research has begun to pay more attention to what are called atypical emotions—that is, ‘categories of negative emotion, such as fear, which feel pleasant’, or ‘categories of positive emotion, such as happiness, which feel unpleasant’.⁴⁰

As with the current focus on the politics of pleasurable feelings, this attention to mixed emotions also reintroduces within another disciplinary context questions that have been approached in previous movements in critical theory and literary studies. In this case, the questions of how pleasure and pain are often intermixed or renegotiated, both cognitively and in the literature that presumably reflects those cognitive states, returns the field to questions addressed by Freud and the hugely elucidating power of psychoanalytic criticism. The early