Weeping Eyes

Eyes function as organs of both perception and expression: they can see, but they can also show. Challenging a long-running scholarly bias in favour of their visual function, Weeping Eyes foregrounds the organ's major role in affect and emotion, probing the different ways that tears are conceptualised in both sentimental and scientific literature. Centred around the rise of ophthalmology as a discipline in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, it considers how historical developments in ocular science shaped literary depictions of seeing and feeling. By rethinking what it can mean to cry, Megan Nash overturns critical paradigms that have long dominated ideas of the eyes and vision, and tackles some of the most pressing conceptual questions of affect studies.