Nicholas Manning is Professor of American Literature at Université Grenoble Alpes and a fellow of the Institut universitaire de France. His most recent monograph is The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and Emotional Truth (2023).

An elegant, impressive account of American realism's encounters with the aesthetic and political challenges of representing emotion. Boldly anti-foundationalist in its critiques of universalizing approaches to literary value, Manning's book embraces bodily agency and the fluidity and meta-reflexivity of affective circuits, with far-reaching consequences for understanding the creation of literary and ethical meanings.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Against True Feeling1. Can Realism Speak of Affect?2. Beyond Natural Feeling: The Body as Artifice3. Inimitable Affect: On the Mimesis of Emotion 4. Myths of Emotional Equilibrium5. Medicalization, Pathologisation and the Intoxicated SelfConclusion: The Theatre of the Affective MindNotesBibliographyIndex

Nicholas Manning is Professor of American Literature at Université Grenoble Alpes and a fellow of the Institut universitaire de France. His most recent monograph is The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and Emotional Truth (2023).

An elegant, impressive account of American realism's encounters with the aesthetic and political challenges of representing emotion. Boldly anti-foundationalist in its critiques of universalizing approaches to literary value, Manning's book embraces bodily agency and the fluidity and meta-reflexivity of affective circuits, with far-reaching consequences for understanding the creation of literary and ethical meanings.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Against True Feeling1. Can Realism Speak of Affect?2. Beyond Natural Feeling: The Body as Artifice3. Inimitable Affect: On the Mimesis of Emotion 4. Myths of Emotional Equilibrium5. Medicalization, Pathologisation and the Intoxicated SelfConclusion: The Theatre of the Affective MindNotesBibliographyIndex

Nicholas Manning is Professor of American Literature at Université Grenoble Alpes and a fellow of the Institut universitaire de France. His most recent monograph is The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and Emotional Truth (2023).

An elegant, impressive account of American realism's encounters with the aesthetic and political challenges of representing emotion. Boldly anti-foundationalist in its critiques of universalizing approaches to literary value, Manning's book embraces bodily agency and the fluidity and meta-reflexivity of affective circuits, with far-reaching consequences for understanding the creation of literary and ethical meanings.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Against True Feeling1. Can Realism Speak of Affect?2. Beyond Natural Feeling: The Body as Artifice3. Inimitable Affect: On the Mimesis of Emotion 4. Myths of Emotional Equilibrium5. Medicalization, Pathologisation and the Intoxicated SelfConclusion: The Theatre of the Affective MindNotesBibliographyIndex