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Civil society should be understood not merely in terms of contrasting symbolic categories but as structures of feeling, the diffusely sensed obligations and rights that represent, and are at the same time evoked by, contrasting solidary ties. Collective representations of such social relationships are broadcast by civil society institutions specializing in communicative, not regulative tasks—by the mass media, public opinion polls, and voluntary organizations. The structures of feeling that such institutions produce must be conceptualized as influence rather than authoritative control, or power in a more structural sense. They institutionalize civil society by creating messages that translate general codes into situationally specific evaluations and descriptions. This chapter analyzes these organizations of influence. It begins by discussing the lifeworld of public opinion which anchors communicative and regulative institutions alike.

The introduction clarifies the use of “social emotions” and discusses the concept in relation to debates over the nature and historicity of emotions in the social sciences and the humanities. It argues that a phenomenology of historical emotions—social emotions felt, expressed, and understood by others as well as oneself—cannot be derived from humoral medicine or other etiological and physiological theories of the period. Social emotions participate in “structures of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s phrase. They are a form of embodied social “thought,” in Michelle Rosaldo’s sense, an affective and cognitive apprehension that “I am involved.” With the help of Williams, Rosaldo, Peter Marshall, Sara Ahmed, Patrick Collinson, and a number of other historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars, I argue that the Reformation in England did not succeed in severing affective ties to the past but did manage to loosen and unravel them, with significant consequences for individual and collective senses of identity. Like the emptiness at the foundations of St. Paul’s after 1549, gaps had opened up in the affective landscape of the period. The introduction closes with brief readings of plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare and an overview of the chapters to come

This chapter examines the role of Dickens's aesthetics works in enabling Dickens to become the author most adapted for the screen. It is an exploration, through Dickens's relationship with film, of the ideology of the aesthetic in relation to the mass market, a topic famously addressed by Sergei Eisenstein in his essay ‘Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves’. The chapter argues that the ‘structures of feeling’ in Dickens's art enabled it to function as a bridge between the most popular form of entertainment in his own day (stage melodrama) and the most popular form of entertainment in the age that followed (the screen). While Dickens's influence on film and the influence of nineteenth‐century stage melodrama on Dickens is well known, this chapter maintains that it is the ability of Dickens's novels to ‘sit astride’ melodramatic and realist aesthetics that is the key to their capacity to function as a bridge between stage melodrama and the new medium of the cinema. The history of Dickens on screen makes clear that aesthetic forms, especially when transported across historical periods and cultures, do not carry with them unchanging or consistent ideological baggage.

This chapter explores how locally marginalized young musicians and dancers from Monterrey, Mexico, adopted and transformed cumbia in order to develop a sense of transnational belonging that ties them not only to Colombia, the place of origin of the genre, but also to the U.S. Borrowing Raymond Williams's notion of “structures of feeling,” the author shows the preeminent place of music and sound in the construction of a sense of cultural citizenship that is clearly transnational.

The everyday and the racial form of Asian Americans both depend on the non-sublime awareness of large numbers in the context of capitalist modernity. The modern everyday consists in a sense of scale and a particular experience of time as empty repetition. Asian American writing can be considered a form of realism because of its concern with the modern everyday. This book reads for the everyday as a structure of feeling.

Chapter 1 explores the ideological and socioeconomic structures constructed by the founders of the Tokugawa government as the mechanism of rule capable of sustaining the newly unified polity after century-long civil war and strife. It then examines the dramatic transformations of socioeconomic structures around the beginning of the eighteenth century, and how those transformations brought about popular articulations of a new sensibility or “structure of feeling,” and how it in turn led to a profound sense of dissonance with the ideological structure in place. The structure of feeling manifested itself in the word ukiyo, or the floating world, which denoted the sense of ontological indeterminacy and was often used in and to refer to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century artistic and literary genres. To examine the use of this term, ukiyo, I focus on the genre called the “story of double-suicide,” which depicted the tragedy of forbidden love between townsman and courtesan. The popularity of the genre was such that ordinary townspeople began to copy the suicides. The authorities responded by imposing bans on the performance of the genre. The chapter probes the implications of this criminalization as a case that demonstrates the crucial interface of governmental power and popular culture.

This chapter looks at the ways U.S. racial economies and class relationships were reshaped by a redrawing of the boundaries that followed the Gold Rush and the U.S.-Mexican War. It also aims to show that identifying the intersecting trajectories of the various revisions of the Murrieta crime narrative can reveal many interdependent relationships. These include the mid-nineteenth-century popularization of a fictive, transcontinental, white, American identity and the long, uneven postwar re-racialization of former Mexican nationals and other Spanish speakers. The chapter determines that the different versions of the Murrieta story suggest how whiteness took hold as a unifying transcontinental and national structure of feeling. The ways the structure's parameters started to shift during the postwar period to include previously despised European groups and to exclude the majority of the newly conquered peoples in the West are also studied.

The emergence of affect theory has returned the body to cultural theory by stressing the phenomenological impact of bodies on other bodies. Chapter 6 opens with a reading of Baudelaire’s “Une Passante” that offers one such instance. Despite its emphasis on what Lauren Berlant calls the “messy dynamics of attachment,” affect theory has not attended to disability where the encounter with the non-traditional body incites emotions of anxiety, confusion, and in some cases solidarity. This chapter explores a structure of feeling around dynamic historical changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through works by Sigmund Freud, Frank Norris, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Toomer. Each illustrates stages in what Sara Ahmed calls “dramas of contingency” by which world historical changes are registered through quotidian moments of attention and confrontation. These stages mark a trajectory in the novel, from Realism and Naturalism to the modernism of Woolf and Toomer.

The introduction examines Raymond Williams’s notion of “Structures of feeling” and how it has been theorized. Then, it reviews the history of class in China, the changes made to the Chinese class structure during the Maoist period (1949 to 1978), and the use of class figures in Chinese visual culture to advertise political changes, criticize institutions and attitudes, and inspire the populace. It concludes by examining the effects that China’s market reforms adopted in the Reform Era (beginning 1978) has had on Chinese society.

This chapter argues that the historical relic cannot be understood apart from the specifically nineteenth-century form of the sentimental memento. Like the memento, the relic was bound up with sentimental structures of feeling. It was designed to evoke “memories” of the historical past, to create bonds of sympathy between the living and the dead, and to unite the living in a community of shared feeling. Mementoes—and by extension relics—should also be understood as a material means of channeling affect. They allowed their users to physically engage with the body of the one being remembered, to merge the physical boundaries of the rememberer and the remembered, and to affirm mutual commitments. They were efficacious objects, things that could effect changes in the self’s relational world that could not take place without them.

This chapter centers on the actual physical-natural substances of African urban environments, but also on the imaginary – the symbolic and spiritual conceptualizations of those landscapes, as seen for instance in place-names - with Zanzibar as the featured city. Conceptually, the chapter builds from both African studies scholarship and from what was once called the ‘new’ cultural geography. It examines the cityscape physically, politically and metaphysically, arguing for the significance of spiritual cityscapes to everyday cultural understandings of urban environments as well as the generally common pattern of risk in terms of physical settings (emphasizing vulnerabilities to climate change). Emphasis on the importance of religion and spirituality in African cityscapes is not about further exoticising urbanism on the continent but instead a crucial space for using insights from African urban political ecology to speak back to UPE in other parts of the world. The Zanzibar case builds an understanding of the structures of feeling in the cityscape as manifestations of the Swahili term, fitina, meaning discord. The chapter shows that the development of a critical analysis of environmental politics requires recognition of the depths of complexity in socio-environmental conflicts such as those in Zanzibar.

This chapter examines the roles of emotion in Nepal’s Maoist People’s War through attention to senior Maoist composer Khusiram Pakhrin’s opera ‘Returning from the Battlefield’. This opera was composed and performed specifically to promote unity within the party at a critical time during the war. Through close attention to the music and lyrics of this opera and their situation within a Nepali national imaginary, this chapter argues that the party promotes a particular regime of emotion, or politically regulated set of structures of feeling, and that artists make use of musical and poetic tropes common in wider Nepali society to promote intra-party unity and shared feelings of commitment to a common goal.

This chapter presents stories of childhood and early adolescence to consider the beginnings of radical subjectivity and journeys towards left enclaves. It situates the protagonists’ stories against existing studies of post-war family life in order to show how they fit into prevalent patterns of social continuity and change, and to emphasise their role as agents challenging the post-war social and domestic consensus. Through attention to early structures of feeling or underlying feeling, it shows how encounters and experiences in the family home, school, and local community intersected with the wider national and international world, to forge often uneasy and disputatious relationships with the post-war landscape.

This chapter explicates the concept of affect. It explains how affect is mediated though newer technologies that connect us and permit us to tell stories about who we are and how we make sense of the world. The focus then turns to Twitter, which is interpreted as a platform supporting networked structures of feeling. Richer understandings of the place of the internet in contemporary political environments can be obtained by examining how networked platforms support affective processes. These processes produce affective statements that mix fact with opinion, and with emotion, in a manner that simulates the way that we politically react in our everyday lives.

Starting with an examination of two readings of Lucan in the hitherto little-known play Cinthias Revenge (1613), by the English lawyer and satirist John Stephens, the introduction argues that Lucan’s sharp rise in popularity during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the equally pronounced revival of interest in the Bellum Ciuile amongst classics and English scholars over the last thirty years, makes a study of Lucan’s Renaissance reception timely and topical. Drawing on the ‘sociology of reading practices’ outlined by Renaissance scholars such as Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, William Sherman and others, it argues that firstly responses to Lucan must be situated in relation to the reading habits and assumptions of their time, rather than read through modern accounts of his text (especially those structured teleologically around ideas like the epic tradition); but that it is also necessary to recognize the specific dynamics of individual engagements within a narrative of historical conflict and change. It stresses the importance of political experience and structures of feeling alongside political ideology for understanding Lucan’s reception.

This chapter considers the terms by which Rudolph Valentino’s historical female spectatorship is shaped by both identifications with and desires for the feminized star. These entangled spectatorial relations are often associated with Valentino’s negation of cross-sex desire, whether through his onscreen relationships with mannish or asexual female figures, or his offscreen relationships with well-known sapphic figures. The chapter argues that these and other elements of Valentino’s contradictory fantasy image, though constitutive of his sexual ambiguity, comprise a more obscure fantasmatic supporting female same-sex desire and new forms of sexual identity shared by women and men. The spectatorial possibilities that accrue to Valentino are suggestive of the unpredictable but also generative possibilities of the Hollywood star system by which the seeming impossibility of desire between women might register in more diffuse terms as a kind of recognizable queer affect or structure of feeling.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the new forms of environmental consciousness emerging in the 1960s and early 1970s around pollution and systemic toxicity. It focuses specifically on Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, discussing their approaches to ecological interconnection under the sign of crisis but also the ways in which this interconnection is difficult to perceive or understand. The chapter then turns from their reflections on the scarcely perceptible intimacies of ecological interconnection to an examination of John Ashbery’s poetry, which explores these thresholds. Exploring Ashbery’s portrayals of waste and air as phenomena undergoing change, this chapter argues that Ashbery’s work depicts various forms of environmental consciousness. His poetry unfolds an affirmative embrace of ecological uncertainty that involves neither critique nor attempt to repair damage, nor even an attempt to understand the causes of emergent crisis. Instead, he traces the way crisis can be sensed in his poetic surrounds.