Feeling Environments Emotions Beyond Human Interiority

This article proposes that as the history of emotions develops, looking beyond the human individual and human interiority as the locus of emotions may enable researchers to address current concerns in the field and to sustain interdisciplinary conversations. Written collaboratively by a historian (Frederik Schrcer) and a literary scholar trained as a neuroscientist (Laura Otis), our essay draws on recent insights in the sciences and the humanities to explore South Asian literary sources spanning two millennia. To show how emotions emerge in "feeling environments," we compare descriptions of people experiencing nature in classical South Asian texts and in Arundhati Roy's novel, "The God of Small Things."