Introduction
This chapter describes the largest historical, theoretical, and methodological claims of Passion’s Fictions: that in the early modern period a rhetoric of the passions destabilized a received faculty psychology, only to be itself absorbed into new natural histories of the passions; that the concept of passion in the early modern period was crucially shaped by rhetoric, with its account of passion as a situated, worlded, object-oriented mode of cognition; that the rhetoric of the passions centered on an account of narrative as a mode of the knowledge of the passions in their world-bound particularity; that rhetoric also shaped emerging forms of literary production, from Shakespeare’s drama to the rise of the novel; and that literary studies needs to attend to the active role of its own material in the history of the psychology of the passions. The chapter also situates the arguments made in Passion’s Fictions with respect to a series of related areas of inquiry: the history of emotion; affect theory; cognitive cultural studies; the history of philosophy; and the history of science. Overall, it aims to show the intimate links between literature and the sciences of soul and mind through the whole period from 1500 to 1800, and it makes the case that literary history is a crucial territory for investigating changing ways of thinking about the passions, not just in the rarefied space of philosophical and scientific debate but also in broader areas of discourse and culture.