Theorizing Emotion and Affect

Scholars attempting to cover the history of research on emotion often chart a course through work by Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, and William James. These names become anchoring points in a chronological overview of emotion as a concept. Of course, like all broad-brush attempts to survey such a vast and complicated area, they leave out several other important scholars, such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Silvan S. Tomkins, and Raymond Williams. This chapter is not intended as a history of the concept of emotion. Several books have been written already that successfully move through the theoretical development of the term. Robert C. Solomon’s (2003) What Is an Emotion? Classic and Contemporary Readings ([1984] 2003), for instance, provides an excellent historical overview alongside written work from Aristotle to Martha Nussbaum. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (2006) by Daniel M. Gross is a radical reading of similar writers. Jennifer Harding and E. Deidre Pribram’s Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader (2009) offers recent work within the fields of cultural and critical studies, and Jerome Kagan’s What Is Emotion?: History, Measures and Meanings (2007) charts a sophisticated course through the history of emotion in fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, and neurobiology.