Bringing together experts from linguistics, medieval and modern literary studies, this volume offers a transhistorical look at the language and cultural work of emotion in a variety of written, oral and visual texts. Contributors engage with the recent so-called affective turn, but also examine the language and use of emotion from a variety of perspectives, touching on issues such as Romantic and Modernist aesthetics, the history of emotions, melodrama and the Gothic, emotional rhetoric, reception aesthetics, rudeness, swearing and attitudes to varieties of English.