This introductory chapter situates the contributions of individual essays in this edited collection in the contexts of recent work in affect studies. Volume editor Stephen Ahern identifies concerns and insights shared by contributors as they work to incorporate lines of theory not always read together, accounting for the affective intensities that circulate through texts and readers and tracing the operations of affectively charged social scripts. In the process Ahern provides a wide-ranging critical introduction to an emerging field of research, one still striving to determine how literary critical practice might best be informed by recent theorizations of affect.