Introduction: Affective and Emotional Encounters in/with British Women's Writing, 1600–1800

Authors

Anna-Rose Shack, University of FreiburgFollow
Zoë Van Cauwenberg, Ghent University / KU LeuvenFollow
Fauve Vandenberghe, Ghent UniversityFollow

Author Biography

Anna-Rose Shack is a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded DERIVATE project at the University of Freiburg. She was awarded her PhD by the University of Amsterdam in October, 2025. Funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), her doctoral research examined the poetics of vulnerability in early modern women’s poetry. Anna-Rose’s work has appeared in Women’s Writing and The Pulter Project, and is forthcoming in an edited collection entitled Reading the Coastline in Shakespeare’s Britain (Edinburgh University Press). In 2025, she won the biennial Patricia Crawford Postgraduate Publication Prize. Zoë Van Cauwenberg is a B.A.E.F. postdoctoral fellow in Irish Studies at Boston College where she works on Anglo-Irish women’s antiquarian and historical writing from the Romantic period. In 2025, she obtained a PhD in literary studies from KU Leuven and in history from Ghent University with a dissertation on women’s literary representation of Scottish and Irish histories in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Fauve Vandenberghe is currently a Fulbright and B.A.E.F. Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at Harvard University (2026). She was previously an FWO Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Academia Belgica in Rome (Summer-Fall 2025) and received her PhD in Literary Studies in June 2025 from Ghent University. Her first book project, tentatively titled Hyenas in Petticoats: Eighteenth-Century British Women's Satire, examines a corpus of satiric works by female writers and studies the deeply intertwined and reciprocal relationship between satiric theory and notions of womanhood during the eighteenth century.

Abstract

This special issue explores the methodological affordances of the fields of affect theory and the history of emotions in the study of women’s writing from the early modern period, the long eighteenth century and the Romantic period. It posits that the vocabularies of affect theory and the history of emotions offer a productive critical framework to approach historical women’s writing. In reading women’s writing through this lens, this special issue aims to model a theoretically flexible and historically informed approach to affect and emotions that may be taken up across and beyond traditional literary periodizations and in different forms of writing.  This introduction provides an overview of the essays in our collection, identifying shared thematic and theoretical concerns. Three intersecting avenues of inquiry structure our introductory essay: the role of affect and embodiment in producing and structuring knowledge; the generation of affect through literary and non-literary forms; and the role of affect and emotion in shaping the reception and valuation of women’s writing. By centering affect and emotion both as objects of analysis and critical methods, this special issue aims to model new ways of reading early modern, eighteenth-century and Romantic-era women’s writing that are attentive to embodiment, literary form and scholarly affect across various historical contexts.

Keywords

affect theory, history of emotions, women's writing, early modern, eighteenth century, Romanticism, feminist formalism

Recommended Citation

Shack, Anna-Rose; Van Cauwenberg, Zoë; and Vandenberghe, Fauve (2025) "Introduction: Affective and Emotional Encounters in/with British Women's Writing, 1600–1800," ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830: Vol.15: Iss.2, Article 1.
http://doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.15.2.1446
Available at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol15/iss2/1