The emergence of affect theory has returned the body to cultural theory by stressing the phenomenological impact of bodies on other bodies. Chapter 6 opens with a reading of Baudelaire’s “Une Passante” that offers one such instance. Despite its emphasis on what Lauren Berlant calls the “messy dynamics of attachment,” affect theory has not attended to disability where the encounter with the non-traditional body incites emotions of anxiety, confusion, and in some cases solidarity. This chapter explores a structure of feeling around dynamic historical changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through works by Sigmund Freud, Frank Norris, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Toomer. Each illustrates stages in what Sara Ahmed calls “dramas of contingency” by which world historical changes are registered through quotidian moments of attention and confrontation. These stages mark a trajectory in the novel, from Realism and Naturalism to the modernism of Woolf and Toomer.
