Textual Form and Cultural Affect: William Empson′s Double-Plot and Raymond Williams′s Structure of Feeling

By insisting on the primacy of double-plot, Empson brackets the sometimes deceptive appearances of a text′s content to uncover and disengage the more fundamental double-plot system at work within the defining structure of the text. Empson′s thinking about the reception of double-plot structures enables Raymond Williams′s early formulations of structure of feeling, in particular the gesturing this perplexing, underdeveloped, but persistent concept makes towards understanding collective response to cultural forms. This article explores the implications of the reception of double-plot structures, drawing out the assumptions inscribed in Empson′s claims about processes at work as an audience engages with these dramatic structures.