The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and Emotional Truth

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

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.