“Feeling,” in its multiple forms of meaning, is central to the literature and culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The eighteenth century saw the rise of the the cult of sensibility, aesthetic explorations of the sublime, and medical explorations of the nerves; while the nineteenth saw the literary cultivation of sympathy and psychological theories of emotion. Whether emotional, affective, or physical, the push to define and understand “feeling” was frequently attended by anxiety about feeling’s propensity to spill over and overwhelm. Recent turns within fields such as the history of the senses, affect theory, and disability studies, among others, have given us additional frameworks to consider the various ways that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries negotiated and complicated “feeling” across multiple registers and understood its excesses. This panel seeks papers that address surplus emotion, affect, or sensation in any dimension of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century literature and culture.

This panel will be held at the upcoming Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) convention, March 7-10, 2024 in Boston, MA.

Please submit a 300-word abstract and brief bio on the NeMLA portal by September 30, 2023.