Affect, Form and Matter in 17th-Century Lyric Poetry

ongoing

This research project on Affect, Form and Matter in 17th-Century Lyric Poetry (AFM) aims to trace the formal, material and textu(r)al entanglements of affect in English metaphysical poetry and to find a new methodology of reading (for) affect in literary texts. The project’s fundamental claims are that (1) affect is entangled in a text’s form, materiality and cultural-historical contexts and that (2) it is a constitutive element of metaphysical poetry and accounts for the particularities of this style of early modern writing. To come to terms with affect’s complex textual entanglements, a new methodology, tentatively called “differential reading,” will be developed. Differential reading is an integrative method that combines approaches from affect studies, new formalism, new materialism and cognitive studies but also pays heed to the cultural-historical contexts of production and reception that impact on a text’s affectivity. Differential reading will serve as the central approach to metaphysical poetry as well as to poetry by 17th-century women writers who are not typically classified as ‘metaphysical,’ but whose poems show similar affective-stylistic entanglements. The project will result in differential readings of a range of 17th-century poems that will show the centrality of affects to the metaphysical style. Poetic affect will be traced across different modes and motifs that are both key to metaphysical poetry and to the experience of affect, namely seeing and hearing as sensory modes of affective encounter; time and space as affectively inflected modes of perception and orientation; and material objects as cultural-historical sites of affective encounters. Finally, the project will also consider how these poems metapoetically reflect their own engagement with affect. The project’s results will be of use not only for the field of early modern literature, but for researchers in literature and affect and in the wider field of affect studies alike.