Introduction

This chapter is an introduction to how affective neuroscience illuminates what certain novels do for us emotionally and ethically, beginning with Dostoevsky’s influence on the history of emotions in the period 1864–2018. Particular works by Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison, and Kazuo Ishiguro are explored to indicate how Freud’s provisional ideas in psychology are now being placed on an organic foundation, as Freud himself forecast. A new language that describes the brain and body’s primary-process is revolutionizing the practice of psychotherapy. Affective neuroscience is now beginning to influence the practices of literary theory.