This chapter argues that antebellum sensationalism, broadly defined, offers a key archive for understanding the emotional life of capitalism. The first half of the chapter examines the period’s two best-selling novels, George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and argues that sensationalism adopts and makes use of the affective excesses of melodrama. The chapter shows how, repeatedly, these and other sensational texts stage characters whose postures of emotional distress reflect a desire for spiritual meaning and social connection that transcends the modern, rational world of capitalism – that which Max Weber famously describes in terms of “disenchantment.” The second half of the chapter turns to urban sensationalism. Here, the chapter contends that most of these popular texts revolve around a sentimental logic whereby the tears of the financially distressed act as the markers of middle-class sensibility. Affect thus becomes an alternate currency. The chapter concludes with the most canonical example of urban sensation fiction: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). The argument here is that “Bartleby” turns the emotional registers of sensationalism inside out. For though Bartleby is the melodramatic and sentimental victim of capitalism and disenchantment, he also rejects the emotional gestures of these genres.

The goal of this chapter is to answer the question: what is emotion? We begin by presenting a brief overview of the early history of emotion studies, charting a trajectory from the study of emotions from Aristotle in classical times through to the work of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and from Descartes to Hume. and We then move on to those thinkers who are, arguably, responsible for the very beginnings of modern enquiry into emotion study: Charles Darwin and William James. We offer a summary of the three main theoretical approaches to affective science that exist today: the so-called basic emotion view, the psychological-constructionist view and appraisal theory. We will claim there are a number of reasons to favour the appraisal theory account, one of the principal of which is of these being that there are good reasons to suggest it is the one that marries most successfully with relevance theory, the pragmatic framework we adopt. As such, it offers a route ahead for genuinely interdisciplinary research involving those working in pragmatics and those working in affective science.