Introduction: Affective and Emotional Encounters in/with British Women's Writing, 1600–1800

This special issue explores the methodological affordances of the fields of affect theory and the history of emotions in the study of women’s writing from the early modern period, the long eighteenth century and the Romantic period. It posits that the vocabularies of affect theory and the history of emotions offer a productive critical framework to approach historical women’s writing. In reading women’s writing through this lens, this special issue aims to model a theoretically flexible and historically informed approach to affect and emotions that may be taken up across and beyond traditional literary periodizations and in different forms of writing. This introduction provides an overview of the essays in our collection, identifying shared thematic and theoretical concerns. Three intersecting avenues of inquiry structure our introductory essay: the role of affect and embodiment in producing and structuring knowledge; the generation of affect through literary and non-literary forms; and the role of affect and emotion in shaping the reception and valuation of women’s writing. By centering affect and emotion both as objects of analysis and critical methods, this special issue aims to model new ways of reading early modern, eighteenth-century and Romantic-era women’s writing that are attentive to embodiment, literary form and scholarly affect across various historical contexts.