The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures)

This volume explores the possibilities and potentialities of “negative” affect in postcolonial literature and literary theory, featuring work on postcolonial studies, First Nations studies, cognitive cultural studies, cognitive historicism, reader response theory, postcolonial feminist studies, and trauma studies. The chapters of this work investigate negative affect in all its types and dimensions: analyses of the structures of feeling created by socio-political forces; assemblages and alliances produced by negative emotion; enactive interrelationships of emotion and environment; and the ethical implications of emotional response, to name a few. It seeks to rebrand “negative” emotions as productive forces which can paradoxically confer pleasure, agential power, and social progress through literary representation.

Jean-François Vernay is the author of five monographs including The Seduction of Fiction: A Plea for Putting Emotions Back into Literary Interpretation (2016), translated into Mandarin by Dr Jun Feng, La séduction de la fiction (2019), and Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness (Routledge, 2021). He has also edited a Routledge volume: The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities: Conversations Between Neurocognitive Research and Australian Literature, published in 2021. His monographs have been taken up for translation into English, Arabic, Korean, and Mandarin.

Donald R. Wehrs, Hargis Professor of English Literature at Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA, is editor or co-editor of five collections, most recently Cultural Memory: From the Sciences to the Humanities (Routledge, 2023) and The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism (2017). He is author of four monographs, most recently Ethical Sense and Literary Significance: Deep Sociality and the Cultural Agency of Imaginative Discourse (Routledge, 2024), as well as essays on literary theory, Shakespeare, postcolonial studies, 18th-century British fiction, and comparative literature.

Isabelle Wentworth is a lecturer in English at the Australian Catholic University. Her research is in cognitive literary criticism, particularly within the contemporary literature of Australia and South America. Her work has been recently published in Poetics Today, Textual Practice, Cognitive Systems Research, and Hispanic Studies Review, among other international journals. Her first monograph, Catching Time: Interaction, Cognition, and Temporality in the Novel (Routledge) was published in 2024.