Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores emotion and its diversity in drama, theatre and contemporary performance and the unifying and separating tendencies of the emotions, emotional feeling, mood and affect. It discusses human and human to nonhuman emotion is anchored in classic dramatic narratives and theatrical interpretations that make ephemeral conditions such as the emotions, emotional feelings, mood and affect comprehensible. The book examines Aristotle's unifying continuum in which thinking of the emotions leads to emotional feeling, and facilitates judgement and belief in human separateness from nonhuman species and nature. It considers how modern drama depicts the bodily phenomena of emotional feeling and mood in an inherently theatre-like exchange as it unifies individual and social moods within an aesthetic mood and points to phenomenological freedoms.