The Conclusion reflects back on the many weeping eyes considered in the course of the book, as well as the insights they provide concerning the tear’s complicated relationship with perception and knowledge, with affect and signification, with gender and power, and with science and sentimentality. It also examines an advertisement for spectacles that illustrates some of the ocular challenges the Victorian periodical press posed to reading eyes. This analysis brings the study back around to affective hermeneutics and to a discussion of the tear as critical lens, a figuration that encapsulates both the theme and method of the project.

The Introduction maps out the historical and theoretical context of Weeping Eyes, and is organised into three parts that each focus on a different ocular function. The first concentrates on crying eyes, comparing literary and scientific conceptions of tears in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and unpacking these through the contemporary theoretical lens of affect studies. The second part focuses on seeing eyes, outlining the key theoretical foundations of vision studies, and problematising long-standing associations that persist between seeing and knowing, and seeing and power. The final section takes up reading eyes, asking what sentimental texts and tears can teach us about the role feeling plays in our engagement with books. Taken together, these sections sketch out the alternative epistemologies and agencies of the eye that are elaborated throughout the rest of the study.