Part 2: Through a reading of the works of Horace Walpole, this book shows the ludic as a mode of play unconditioned by any preconceived judgment or intended outcome. As bourgeois taste is increasingly tasked with dispelling the material conditions of risk, uncertainty, violence, and death that underwrite Britain’s growing colonial wealth, it becomes increasingly hostile to funniness – any kind of oddity, proclivity, or quirk that disrupts an engineered sense of safety, stability, and predictability in the lived world. Borrowing from Brian Massumi’s theorization of “ludic play” between dogs, I invoke eighteenth-century philosophy’s interest in “animal spirits” to show how Walpole coordinates his own ludic scenes. Ludic play, I offer, is a technique for strategically disorganizing the rituals and conceits of civility and good taste, retooling them from techniques of disavowing violence to a means of grappling with violence in its most diffuse and ever-present forms.

The Introduction makes a case for reuniting memory studies and affect studies: like twins separated at birth, these two vibrant fields of in the study of Renaissance literature and culture have existed alongside each other, in spite of their conceptual entanglement, since antiquity. An overview of recent developments in contemporary theorizations of memory and affect is followed by an investigation of how they might be connected in the historical frameworks of early modern faculty psychology, Galenic humoralism, and, to use a modern term, distributed cognition.