Books in the Elements in Histories of Emotions and the Senses series

Newborn imitation has recently become the focus of a major controversy in the human sciences. New studies have reexamined the evidence and found it wanting. This Element offers a critical assessment of the theories of newborn imitation and the stakes involved.

The history of the Virgin Mary in medieval theology is one of an ideologically useful vision of womanhood. This Element deploys the intellectual history of medieval thought to map the moves made in codifying Mary's perfection. It then uses contemporary gender and affect theory, mapping the emotional regimes of the medieval past upon the present.

Designed for scholars thinking about affect and emotion in the humanities and social sciences, this Element also draws on the life sciences to reveal how affect theory can be used to analyse systems of power.

Phiddian explores the distinction between satirical and comic laughter, and the role of satire in licensing public expression of harsh emotions defined in neuroscience as the CAD (contempt, anger, disgust) triad. With a focus on eighteenth-century satirists such as Jonathan Swift, he reveals the importance of satire to free political expression.

A call for historians of emotions and the senses to converge on a new history of experience. Unpicking some assumptions about affective and sensory experience, the human being is re-imagined as both biocultural and historical, reclaiming the analysis of human experience from biology and psychology and seeking new collaborative efforts.

Violence in video games has been a controversial object of public discourse for several decades. Building upon an extensive ethnographic study of players' emotional practices,this Element provides new insights into the complexity and pleasures of player experiences, contributing to societal and academic debate on a critical aspect of video gaming.

Wiiliam Molyneux's question to John Locke about whether a blind man restored to sight could name the difference between a cube and a sphere without touching them shaped fundamental conflicts in philosophy, theology and science between empirical and idealist answers that are radically alien to current ways of seeing and feeling, but were born of colonizing ambitions whose devastating genocidal and ecocidal consequences intensify today. This Element demonstrates how landscape paintings of unfamiliar terrains required historical and geological subject matter to supply tactile associations for empirical recognition of space, whereas idealism conferred unmediated but no less coercive sensory access. Close visual and verbal analysis using photographs of pictorial sites trace vividly different responses to the Question from William Hazlitt and John Ruskin in Britain to nineteenth-century authors and artists in the United States and Australia, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Cole, William Haseltine, Fitz Henry Lane and Eugene von Guerard.

This Element brings together the history of emotions and temporalities, offering a new perspective on both. Time was often imagined as a movement from the past to the future: the past is gone and the future not yet here. Only present-day subjects could establish relations to other times, recovering history as well as imagining and anticipating the future. In a movement paralleling the emphasis on the porous self, constituted by emotions situated not inside but between subjects, this Element argues for a porous present, which is open to the intervention of ghosts coming from the past and from the future. What needs investigating is the flow between times as much as the creation of boundaries between them, which first banishes the ghosts and then denies their existence. Emotions are the most important way through which subjects situate and understand themselves in time.