The Introduction makes a case for reuniting memory studies and affect studies: like twins separated at birth, these two vibrant fields of in the study of Renaissance literature and culture have existed alongside each other, in spite of their conceptual entanglement, since antiquity. An overview of recent developments in contemporary theorizations of memory and affect is followed by an investigation of how they might be connected in the historical frameworks of early modern faculty psychology, Galenic humoralism, and, to use a modern term, distributed cognition.

At the end of Act 4 in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macduff learns that his wife and children have been killed on Macbeth’s orders. Macduff initially experiences grief as involuntary memory. Malcolm urges Macduff to turn immediately to thoughts of revenge, but Macduff is unable to do so. Like Hamlet although more briefly, Macduff is caught in what he calls an intermission of inaction and feeling, analogous to Lauren Berlant’s impasse. In this brief pause, poetic meter, repetition, and enjambment comprise an affective dramaturgy through which grief, disbelief, and anger can be felt and made into the materials for memory. Macduff’s grief is ultimately assimilated into the structure of a revenge plot, but the moment briefly reveals a different way of speaking, thinking, feeling, and remembering, an alternative to both the gendered, racialized chaos of Macbeth and the gendered, racialized control embodied in Malcolm.

Drawing on insights from affect theorists Silvan Tomkins, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, and Sue J. Kim, this chapter argues that Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna developed sophisticated understandings of what affects do: how they are triggered, modulated, and extinguished though human interaction in an unequal field of power relations. Not only did they use writing to meditate on the ways in which fear, hatred, and contempt for the Chinese in North America had shaped their own affective systems, but they also sought to understand what fictional representations of affects could do to the reader. When looked at from the perspective of Tomkinsian theory, such works as “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” and Marion are clearly structured around scenes of shaming, linked by complex reparative scripts that model ways of responding to shame, from self-effacement and withdrawal, through anger and contempt for others, to constructing allegories of a nonracist society and becoming politically engaged. Using such a reading strategy allows us to appreciate particularly those narratives by the Eaton sisters which have hitherto been dismissed as naively sentimental.