To some degree, all of our posts this month have flirted with affect. Whether it’s waking up dazed in confused in graduate school or exploring the significance of melancholia, memory, and reverberating energies, all of these topics point to a larger picture of attempting to understand and read feeling in texts and our daily lives. This week, we’d like to revisit how we’ve engaged with discourses of emotion and feeling in the past. In the following post, Noelle will give a brief overview about [SOMETHING ABOUT VICTORIANS BEING ANXIOUS ABOUT FEELING], and Tyler will focus on [SOMETHING ABOUT HUMANS AND MATERIALS]. Together, these posts reveal how two graduate students attempt to navigate trying to understand what we feel, how/if texts feel, and what we can attempt to say about it.

Mechanics of Victorian “Nervousness”

As a Victorianist, I spend a lot of time talking about nineteenth-century, and specifically Victorian, anxieties…