Introduction: The "Affective Fallacy" Fallacy

The Entanglements of Two Cultures

Literature and Neurology, 1860-1910

Rethinking Emotion

1. "The Zest, the Tingle, the Excitement of Reality"

Toward a New Conceptual Genealogy for American Literary Realism

"Being Moved": Modernity, Evolution, and the Reflex Arc

Laughter, Reflection, and Realization in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

2. Statistical Pity: Elsie Venner and the Controversy over Childbed Fever

The Case against Contagion

Representing "Ontological Shadows"

Holmes's "Algebra of Human Nature"

Pathological Particularity in the Novel

Coda: Anecdote and Abstraction

3. Fear and Epistemology: Tracking the Train of Feeling in A Mortal Antipathy

From Physiognomy to Physiology

Excess and Dissolution of the Nervous System

Embodied Memory and the Pathogenic Secret

The Forensic Self

4. Nervous Effort: Gilman, Crane, and the Psychophysical Pathologies of Everyday Life

Freud, Feminist Reading, and Interrogative Criticism

A Physiological Approach to Nervousness

Effort, Agitation, Aesthetics

Fracture and Fabrication: Crane's The Red Badge of Courage

Coda: Reconstruction and "The Yellow Wallpaper"

5. "Mindless" Pleasure: Embodied Music in The Awakening and Theron Ware

New Varieties of Religious Experience

Theron Ware and the Ironic Rhythm of the Sick Soul

Kate Chopin's Lyrical "Gospel of Relaxation"

Music and the Sounding Board of the Body

The Rhythm of Desire in The Awakening

The Pleasures of "The Storm"

6. Corporeal Wonder: The Occult Entrancements of The Wings of the Dove

Charming Milly

From Trance to Transference--and Back Again

William James and Mrs. Piper: The Medium Is the Message

"Tremendous Rites of Nullification"

Conclusion: Burning Issues

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

ane F. Thrailkill is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.