Affective Personas of the 1920s: The Sheik, If Winter Comes, and the British Reading Public

This essay examines the contrastive ways in which The Sheik and If Winter Comes constitute a particular system of affective circulation while at once reflecting and reinforcing certain ideas, desires, emotions, and fantasies of the 1920s British reading public. While the lowbrow romantic narrative of The Sheik mediates the social flow of joy with a sort of strategic ambiguity in addressing conventional ideas about gender and race, the middlebrow sentimental narrative of If Winter Comes creates the current of sadness around the figure of an ineffectually unconventional man. The discussion of these two best sellers suggests that popular fiction, rather than a record of unchanging human experiences, is a response to and intervention in specific historical situations, and that, in such a practice, the mediation of the social circulation of emotions has a central significance.