HAVING A GOOD CRY: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms

Robyn R. Warhol’s goal is to investigate the effects of readers’ emotional responses to formulaic fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on gendered subjectivity. She argues that modern literary and cultural studies have ignored nonsexual affectivity in their inquiries. The book elaborates on Warhol’s theory of affect and then focuses on sentimental stories, marriage plots, serialized novels, and soap operas as distinct genres producing specific feelings among fans.

Popular narrative forms use formulas to bring up familiar patterns of feelings in the audiences who love them. This book looks at the patterns of feelings that some nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular genres evoke, and asks how those patterns are related to gender. Soap operas and sentimentalism are generally derided as “effeminate” forms because their emotional range is seen as hyperfeminine. Having a Good Cry presents a celebration of effeminate feelings and works toward promoting more flexible, less pejorative concepts of gender. Using a psychophysiological rather than a psychoanalytic approach to reading and emotion, Warhol seeks to make readers more conscious of what is happening to the gendered body when we read.

1114710017
HAVING A GOOD CRY: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms

Robyn R. Warhol’s goal is to investigate the effects of readers’ emotional responses to formulaic fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on gendered subjectivity. She argues that modern literary and cultural studies have ignored nonsexual affectivity in their inquiries. The book elaborates on Warhol’s theory of affect and then focuses on sentimental stories, marriage plots, serialized novels, and soap operas as distinct genres producing specific feelings among fans.

Popular narrative forms use formulas to bring up familiar patterns of feelings in the audiences who love them. This book looks at the patterns of feelings that some nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular genres evoke, and asks how those patterns are related to gender. Soap operas and sentimentalism are generally derided as “effeminate” forms because their emotional range is seen as hyperfeminine. Having a Good Cry presents a celebration of effeminate feelings and works toward promoting more flexible, less pejorative concepts of gender. Using a psychophysiological rather than a psychoanalytic approach to reading and emotion, Warhol seeks to make readers more conscious of what is happening to the gendered body when we read.

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HAVING A GOOD CRY: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms

HAVING A GOOD CRY: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms

by ROBYN R. WARHOL
HAVING A GOOD CRY: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms

HAVING A GOOD CRY: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms

by ROBYN R. WARHOL

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Overview

Robyn R. Warhol’s goal is to investigate the effects of readers’ emotional responses to formulaic fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on gendered subjectivity. She argues that modern literary and cultural studies have ignored nonsexual affectivity in their inquiries. The book elaborates on Warhol’s theory of affect and then focuses on sentimental stories, marriage plots, serialized novels, and soap operas as distinct genres producing specific feelings among fans.

Popular narrative forms use formulas to bring up familiar patterns of feelings in the audiences who love them. This book looks at the patterns of feelings that some nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular genres evoke, and asks how those patterns are related to gender. Soap operas and sentimentalism are generally derided as “effeminate” forms because their emotional range is seen as hyperfeminine. Having a Good Cry presents a celebration of effeminate feelings and works toward promoting more flexible, less pejorative concepts of gender. Using a psychophysiological rather than a psychoanalytic approach to reading and emotion, Warhol seeks to make readers more conscious of what is happening to the gendered body when we read.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780814281772
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Publication date: 07/30/2021
Series: Theory and Interpretation of Narrative
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 172
File size: 783 KB

About the Author

Robyn R. Warhol is professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Table of Contents

Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms by Robyn Warhol

Blank Page

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Contents

Preface: Six Readers Reading—and Feeling

2

3

4

5

6

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER ONE. Introduction: Effeminacy, Feelings, Forms

Effeminacy: A Third Term for Gender Studies

Feelings: How Do You Really Feel ?

Forms: Feminist Narratology and Close Reading

CHAPTER TWO. The Cry: Effeminate Sentimentalism

Having a Good Cry

Sentimentalism and Sexism

A Narratology of Good-Cry Techniques

Crying Over The Color Purple

CHAPTER THREE. The Cringe: Marriage Plots, Effeminacy, and Feminist Ambivalence

Reading Too Closely for Comfort

Discomforts of Reading Pretty Woman

CHAPTER FOUR. The Thrill and the Yawn: Antieffeminate Structures of Feeling in Serial Forms

Self-Conscious Serial Forms

Reading the (Boring) Victorian Serial

Antieffeminate Affect

E-mail as an Antieffeminate Form

Bending Gender and the Habits of Affect

CHAPTER FIVE. The Climax and the Undertow: Effeminate Intensities in Soap Opera

Who Is the “I” Who Watches Soaps?

Intensities and Long-Term Viewing

Effeminate Feeling and Soap Form

Afterword: The Reader’s Body from the Inside Out

Notes to Chapter 1

Notes to Chapter 2

Notes to Chapter 4

Notes to Chapter 5

Bibliography

Index

Series page

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