The conclusion applies the semiotics of affect imagined by Imagism and The Waste Land to several of the novels from the earlier parts of the book, including The Moonstone, A Study in Scarlet, The Waves, and Voyage in the Dark. The conclusion argues that in late Victorian novels affective expressions are incorporated into a novelistic poetics of character, while in the proto-modernist and modernist novels affective expression becomes an object of literary conjecture, a vector of critique, and a source of literary and economic value.

Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark maps the distinction between the country and the city onto the geopolitical scale of colonial metropole and periphery, where the colonial periphery is the semiotic placeholder for the role that London plays in the previous two chapters as the space that disrupts conventional novelistic poetics. In Anna Morgan, two worlds that do not compute – the financialized metropole of London and the preindustrial periphery – collide and the result is a character that operates according to the logic of affect rather than conventional narratives of sentiment and emotion. Her character thereby anticipates the emergence of affect as value form.