Theatres of Feeling

"Historicizing affect provides an important register of cultural developments, and because of this link between theatre and culture, explorations of performance as well as affect have turned to the work of Raymond Williams, in particular to his discussion of 'structures of feelings,' as a means of approaching the complex operation of emotion and theatre. Williams's work has a strong affinity for eighteenth-century studies, and his discussion of what he famously termed 'structures of feeling' is admirably suited to a consideration of the overtly emotional world of eighteenth-century theatre. It is a slippery term, as Williams himself admits, and he suggests as an alternative structures of experience before rejecting that term because of its potential to imply past rather than present experience. These structures are, as Williams emphasizes, a process rather than an ideological system, growing out of lived experience, so that one of the crucial components of these structures of feeling is that they are immediate, situated in a specific moment"--