The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and Emotional Truth
By Nicholas Manning
Edinburg UP, 2025
ISBN: 9781399508001
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-artifice-of-affect.html
Is emotional truth a damaging literary and cultural ideal? The Artifice of Affect proposes that valuing affective authenticity risks creating a homogenized self, encouraged to comply only with accepted moral beliefs. Similarly, when emotional truth is made the primary value of literature, literary texts too often become agents of conformity. Nowhere is this risk explored more fully than in a range of American realist texts from the Cold War to the twentieth century’s end. For the works of writers such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Kathleen Collins, Paula Fox, Ralph Ellison, or Richard Yates, formulate trenchant critiques of true feeling’s aesthetic and social imperatives. The arguments at the heart of this book aim to re-frame emotional processes as visceral constructions, which should not be held to the standards of static ideals of accuracy, legitimacy, or veracity.
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- Offers a literary and cultural critique of the concept of true feeling, using affect theory to analyze post-war realist literatures
- Proposes a wide-ranging literary and cultural critique of the concept of true feeling, especially relevant to the United States’s current sociopolitical climate
- Represents the first book-length study using affect theory to analyze post-war realist literatures
- Argues that twentieth-century American realism is not a conservative genre, but rebels in surprising ways against restrictive notions of authenticity
- Links key concepts in current affect theory with writers such as Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Richard Ford, Paula Fox or Philip Roth, who have never been analyzed using these tools
- Models a new transdisciplinary interaction between affect theory and literature, with literary texts used to reveal the ever-present artifice of corporal processes
- Combines methods from affect theory, literary studies, and the medical humanities
"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." – Adam J. Frank, University of British Columbia
Nicholas Manning is professor of American literature at Université Grenoble Alpes and a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France.
