Introduction: Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel

This short essay introduces a special cluster on the theme of “Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel.” The collective ambition of the essays in the cluster is not to systematically map out the modernist novel’s multitudinous affective forms, but to unsettle the primacy of approaches that too readily read current conceptualizations of emotion into works that mobilize quite different understandings of affect, some drawing on contemporary culture, others entirely idiosyncratic. Ranging from rich excavations of early twentieth century physiology to formalist investigations into the affordances of different narratorial forms, from experimental criticism to narrative theory, and from interwar “high” modernism to more contemporary manifestations, the cluster ultimately presents a range of different angles of incidence on to the dramatizations of affect that lie at the heart of modernist aesthetics.