The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century

The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century PDF

Author: Albert J. Rivero

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-03-21

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1108418929

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Provides twenty-first century readers with a new, comprehensive and suggestive account of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century.

Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France PDF

Author: Lynn Festa

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2006-10-15

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0801889340

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In this ambitious and original study, Lynn Festa examines how and why sentimental fiction became one of the primary ways of representing British and French relations with colonial populations in the eighteenth century. Drawing from novels, poetry, travel narratives, commerce manuals, and philosophical writings, Festa shows how sentimentality shaped communal and personal assertions of identity in an age of empire. Read in isolation, sentimental texts can be made to tell a simple story about the emergence of the modern psychological self. Placed in conversation with empire, however, sentimentality invites both psychological and cultural readings of the encounter between self and other. Sentimental texts, Festa claims, enabled readers to create powerful imagined relations to distant people. Yet these emotional bonds simultaneously threatened the boundaries between self and other, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized. Festa argues that sentimental tropes and figures allowed readers to feel for others, while maintaining the particularity of the individual self. Sentimental identification thus operated as a form of differentiation as well as consolidation. Festa contends that global reach increasingly outstripped imaginative grasp during this era. Sentimentality became an important tool for writers on empire, allowing conquest to be portrayed as commerce and scenes of violence and exploitation to be converted into displays of benevolence and pity. Above all, sentimental texts used emotion as an important form of social and cultural distinction, as the attribution of sentience and feeling helped to define who would be recognized as human.

The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF

Author: John Richetti

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-09-05

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1139825046

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In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.

Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel

Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel PDF

Author: Ann Jessie van Sant

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-05-20

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9780521604581

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This study of sensibility in the eighteenth-century English novel discusses literary representations of suffering and responses to it in the social and scientific context of the period. The reader of novels shares with more scientific observers the activity of gazing on suffering, leading Ann Van Sant to explore the coincidence between the rhetoric of pathos and scientific presentation as they were applied to repentant prostitutes and children of the vagrant and criminal poor. The book goes on to explore the novel's location of psychological responses to suffering in physical forms. Van Sant invokes eighteenth-century debates about the relative status of sight and touch in epistemology and psychology, as a context for discussing the 'man of feeling' (notably in Sterne's A Sentimental Journey) - a spectator who registers his sensibility by physical means.

The Politics of Sensibility

The Politics of Sensibility PDF

Author: Markman Ellis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-07-29

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780521604277

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The sentimental novel has long been noted for its liberal and humanitarian interests, but also for its predilection for refined feeling, the privilege it accords emotion over reason, and its preference for the private over the public sphere. In The Politics of Sensibility, however, Markman Ellis argues that sentimental fiction also consciously participated in some of the most keenly contested public controversies of the late eighteenth century, including the emergence of anti-slavery opinion, discourse on the morality of commerce, and the movement for the reformation of prostitutes. By investigating the significance of political material in the fictional text, and by exploring the ways in which the novels themselves take part in historical disputes, Ellis shows that the sentimental novel was a political tool of considerable cultural significance.

Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature PDF

Author: A. Wetmore

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-11-19

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1137346345

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Analysing texts by Sterne, Smollett, Brooke, and Mackenzie, this book offers a new perspective on a question that literary criticism has struggled with for years: why are many sentimental novels of the 1700s so pervasively and playfully self-conscious, and why is this self-consciousness so often directed toward the materiality of the printed word?

Novel Beginnings

Novel Beginnings PDF

Author: Patricia Meyer Spacks

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0300128339

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In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding’s The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change. Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans à clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates that literary history—by no means inexorable—might have taken quite a different course.

The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF

Author: J. A. Downie

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 625

ISBN-13: 0199566747

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The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth Century Novel is the first published book to cover the 'eighteenth-century English novel' in its entirety. It is an indispensible resource for those with an interest in the history of the novel.

Improving Passions

Improving Passions PDF

Author: Charles Burnetts

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2017-06-26

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0748698205

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Reveals a fascinating history of aesthetic debate concerning the emotional and moral functions of artWhen did the sentimental start to mean aawful? Why are so many popular mainstream films dismissed for their sentimentality, and are there any meaningful differences between the sentimental and the melodramatic? These are some of the questions addressed in Charles Burnetts illuminating genealogy of the concept as both a literary genre and an aesthetic philosophy, a tradition that prefigures the advent of film yet serves as a vital framework for understanding its emotional and ethical appeal. Examining eighteenth century amoral sense philosophy as a neglected but still important intellectual area for film theory, and drawing on case studies of film sentimentality during the early, classical and post-classical eras of US cinema, Improving Passions is an innovative exploration of the sentimental tradition as both theatrical genre and cultural logic.Key featuresExamines eighteenth century amoral sense philosophy and asensibility as neglected, but important, intellectual areas for film theoryProvides case studies of film sentimentality during early, classical and post-classical eras of US cinema, focusing specifically on issues of critical receptionEngages with speculation by classical and contemporary film theorists about the ethical and affective possibilities of filmExamines new approaches to aaffect in film and media philosophy that draw directly on, and reconfigure, a sentimental aesthetics