A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory

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An accessible guide to the work of American psychologist and affect theorist Silvan Tomkins The brilliant and complex theories of psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1911-1991) have inspired the turn to affect in the humanities, social sciences, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, these theories are not well understood. A Silvan Tomkins Handbook makes his theories portable across a range of interdisciplinary contexts and accessible to a wide variety of contemporary scholars and students of affect. A Silvan Tomkins Handbook provides readers with a clear outline of Tomkins's affect theory as he developed it in his four-volume masterwork Affect Imagery Consciousness. It shows how his key terms and conceptual innovations can be used to build robust frameworks for theorizing affect and emotion. In addition to clarifying his affect theory, the Handbook emphasizes Tomkins's other significant contributions, from his broad theories of imagery and consciousness to more focused concepts of scenes and scripts. With their extensive experience engaging and teaching Tomkins's work, Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson provide a user-friendly guide for readers who want to know more about the foundations of affect studies.

Reviews

"Taking a cartographic approach to Silvan Tomkinss considerable volumes of work, Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson extend the reach and significance of his theories of affect into new territories, problems, concepts, and tantalizing ways of approaching the strange status of subjectivity. Unique, persuasive, and illuminating, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook is essential reading for advancing the field of affect studies beyond psychological individualisms of all kinds."Lisa Blackman, author of Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

"Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson beautifully demonstrate the distinctiveness, suppleness, complexity, and generativity of Silvan Tomkinss writings and concepts. The handbook makes vividly and urgently clear how much there remains, in the twenty-first century, to unearth and think through in relation to this distinctive twentieth-century psychologist and to models of affect and subjective experience more broadly."Felicity Callard, University of Glasgow

Author Bio

Adam J. Frank is professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is author of Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and coeditor (with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) of Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader.

Elizabeth A. Wilson is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and author of Gut Feminism and Affect and Artificial Intelligence.