New Directions in History of Emotion and Affect Theory in Eighteenth‐Century Studies

Abstract Increasing critical energy focuses on history of emotion and affective theory in order to better understand the eighteenth century. Scholars are re‐examining history, literature, and culture to consider the importance of how people felt to what they experienced, how they thought, and how they acted in the eighteenth century. The essay examines the emotion words in use in this scholarly endeavor (such as passions, sentiments, and sensibility), the connections between affects, emotions, and politics, and the epistemological explorations connected to feeling. By surveying affective and emotional methods of interrogation from the past thirty years, this essay both concentrates on historical, cultural, and literary studies to map how scholars of the eighteenth century are analyzing the shape of emotion in the past, and it looks forward to new energy in this field of inquiry.