UC Berkeley

This dissertation questions how affect is communicated to and felt by readers or audience members through the medium of poetry, namely the poetry of Shakespeare and Spenser. I lay out how affect is generated through impressions as discussed in terms of relevance theory, and how they were seen to be generated in humoral terms through impressions. I also put forth a term for phenomena in early modern poems that use impressions to create an extra organization that acts like a poetic device. I argue that this should be termed a poetic device that I call incidentals.