Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Introduction - Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura

Part I: Rewriting discourses of pleasure
1 Happy Hamlet - Richard Strier
2 Therapeutic laughter in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy - Cassie M. Miura
3 The pleasure of the text: reading and happiness in Rabelais and Montaigne - Ian Frederick Moulton
4 Pleasure and the 'rustic life' - Ullrich Langer

Part II: Imagining happy communities
5 The theology of cheer, Erasmus to Shakespeare - Timothy Hampton
6 'My crown is called content': positive, negative, and political affects in Shakespeare's first tetralogy - Paul Joseph Zajac
7 Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court: faction, emotion, and the Essex Circle - Bradley J. Irish
8 Merriness affect and community in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor - Cora Fox

Part 3: Forms, attachment, and ambivalence
9 Happy objects and earthly pleasure in Thomas Traherne's devotional poetry - Leila Watkins
10 Trust and disgust: the precariousness of positive emotions in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi - Lalita Pandit Hogan
11 'My heart is satisfied': revenge, justice and satisfaction in The Spanish Tragedy - Eonjoo Park
12 All's Well That Ends Well? Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre - Patrick Colm Hogan

Afterword - Michael C. Schoenfeldt -- .