Emotion's Empire

An expansive intersectional study examining how empire is affectively reproduced across a wide range of long eighteenth century literary texts.

Drawing on affect theory, the history of emotions, as well as decolonial and feminist scholarship, this open access study offers three interlocking core concepts—colonial attachment, grievability, and self-preservation—to illuminate how literary texts sustained and occasionally disrupted the emotional logics of empire across different transatlantic contexts. By intertwining “empire” and “emotion,” Emotion’s Empire opens up practices of reading beyond traditional conceptual boundaries.

Re-situating the "grateful slave" trope as part of a larger "colonial attachment narrative," Caroline Koegler broadens understanding of the trope’s place within an overarching affective system shaped by imperial patriarchy. Similarly, the concept "affective coverture" is introduced to explore how women’s normalized legal inferiority – encapsulated in Blackstone’s concept of legal "coverture"—translated into the comparative importance or unimportance of some characters’ feelings and well-being.

While Emotion’s Empire traces normative ways in which these types of affective allocation and integration unfold, it remains attentive to those moments in a narrative that diverge from or question imperial affective conventions, or carry them into new contexts thereby adding to their proliferation or shifting their dynamics and effects. Indeed, this book teases out how intricately and at times how unevenly or seemingly paradoxically literary texts negotiate imperial affect, reflecting empire’s adaptability to different contexts and different agendas during this crucial time in literary history.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections. Open access was funded by Freie Universität Berlin.