1. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes, (1853–5), ed. Andrew Sanders (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995) p. 860.
2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 1996) p. 14.
3. The question of affect is a truly interdisciplinary problem, the concern as much of philosophy, psychoanalysis and psychology as of literary criticism and aesthetics, and thus a tight definition of its meaning (emotion, feeling, affect, sensation, the non-rational, are related but different phenomena with overlapping semantic fields) would inevitably lead to challenges from one area or another. Literary critics have tended to avoid the terminology traps, a silent consensus assuming that this is an undiscussable area of experience simply because one cannot point to the emotions except as an effect of language: or they see the phenomenon of affect in terms of its historical definitions, a trend which has been given an impetus by the need to understand and define post-Enlightenment accounts of gendered writing and the feminine as that characterized by the non-rational. See the sophisticated studies by Julie Ellison, Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)
4. Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
5. Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank, editors of Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995).