The Body of Emotions, the Emotions of the Body: Embodied Emotions from Homer to Byzantine Poetry

While it is widely accepted that emotions are connected with the body, the precise nature of this connection remains difficult to pin down. Recent theories from different fields suggests a somewhat flexible interplay between bodily states and emotion categories, in which social or cultural contexts play an important role. Such generalising theories are helpful to understand the nature of emotion, but it remains important complement them with case stud-ies from other fields, one of them being literature. The contributions to this volume exemplify different forms and aspects of the interplay between emotions and the body, e.g. involuntary bodily reactions vs. consciously controlled expressions of emotion, or subjective vs. intersub-jective experiences – but also the difficulty or impossibility of sorting embodied emotions into neat categories