Emotions and Affect in the Humanities, Creative Arts, and Performance

Dear Colleagues,

The humanities and creative arts illuminate the ways in which the emotions, emotional feelings, affect, and mood are communicated through language and physical expression. They offer diverse perspectives on how personal experience intersects with social significance. This Special Issue invites responses to the question: given scientific and other disciplinary studies, how might the humanities and the creative arts make a distinctive contribution to the cultural understanding of emotions and, thus, to knowledge? Emotions and affect have a crucial function in the creation of connections, linkages, or “assemblages” in human-to-human, as well as human-to-nonhuman animal bonds. Performance, in particular, has been central to ideas of expressive display and the delineation of rules and limits within emotional exchanges, and the histories of literature, theatre, and cinema reveal how these processes change over time. However, it is likely that performance, cinema, literature, and other art forms and media are not simply reflecting social change but also influencing it, and this dynamism invites textual interpretation, as well as consideration, of how the phenomenology of emotion unfolds in lived worlds.

There are Special Issues, for example: New Literary History 4; PMLA on Emotions forthcoming in October 2015.

Prof. Dr. Peta Tait
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

References:

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Gregg, Melissa and Seigworth, Gregory (eds). The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Hurley, Erin. Theatre and Feeling. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Konijn, Elly. Acting Emotions. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000.

Plantinga, Carl. (2009) Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California).

Plantinga, Carl and Smith, Greg M. (1999) Passionate Views (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Thompson, James. Performance Affects: applied theatre and the end of effect. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Welton, Martin. Feeling Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.