Abstract
This chapter examines the depiction of unruly emotional responses to economic practice in early modern English drama. It focuses specifically on potentially inaccessible structures of desire and anger, such as vexation and destructive consuming passions for goods, and argues that there is a significant historical distance built into these feelings that our own emotional instincts cannot properly access. This essay adapts ideas from contemporary economic theory like “affective forecasting” and “hedonic psychology” to work through the problems posed by the distant, unfeelable feelings animating marketplace plays by Jonson, Massinger, and Rowley.
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Zucker, A. (2020). Vexed and Insatiable: Unfeelable Feelings and the Marketplace of Early Modern Drama. In: Mukherji, S., Roberts, D., Tomlin, R., Oppitz-Trotman, G. (eds) Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, vol 2. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_5
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