Nicola Kelly

Thesis

Emotions in the Text-World: Practising Literary Emotion in Hamlet and Troilus and Criseyde

This thesis argues that Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' and Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' generate intradiegetic emotional systems independent of their sociocultural moments of production. Establishing a framework for reading emotional practices in literature, and emphasising the importance of history and embodiment to Monique Scheer's emotional practice theory, I read Troilus and Hamlet as figures who are temporally and corporeally realised through their problematic relationships with the worlds they inhabit.