Sympathy Sensibility And The Literature Of Feeling In The Eighteenth Century
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Author | : I. Csengei |
Publisher | : Springer |
Total Pages | : 272 |
Release | : 2011-12-13 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 0230359175 |
What makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of the benevolent, compassionate ideology of eighteenth-century sensibility? This book explores forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swoons and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century literary, philosophical and scientific texts.
Author | : Ann Jessie van Sant |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 168 |
Release | : 2004-05-20 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 9780521604581 |
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.
Author | : Henry Martyn Lloyd |
Publisher | : Springer Science & Business Media |
Total Pages | : 222 |
Release | : 2013-12-12 |
Genre | : Science |
ISBN | : 3319027026 |
This volume reconstructs the body of sensibility and the discourse which constructed it. The discourse of sensibility was deployed very widely throughout the mid- to late-eighteenth century, particularly in France and Britain. To inquire into the body of sensibility is then necessarily to enter into an interdisciplinary space and so to invite the plurality of methodological approaches which this collection exemplifies. The chapters collected here draw together the histories of literature and aesthetics, metaphysics and epistemology, moral theory, medicine, and cultural history. Together, they contribute to four major themes: First, the collection reconstructs various modes by which the sympathetic subject was construed or scripted, including through the theatre, poetry, literature, and medical and philosophical treaties. It secondly draws out those techniques of affective pedagogy which were implied by the medicalisation of the knowing body, and thirdly highlights the manner in which the body of sensibility was constructed as simultaneously particular and universal. Finally, it illustrates the ‘centrifugal forces’ at play within the discourse, and the anxiety which often accompanied them. At the centre of eighteenth-century thought was a very particular object: the body of sensibility, the Enlightenment’s knowing body. The persona of the knowledge-seeker was constructed by drawing together mind and matter, thought and feeling. And so where the Enlightenment thinker is generally associated with reason, truth-telling, and social and political reform, the Enlightenment is also known for its valorisation of emotion. During the period, intellectual pursuits were envisioned as having a distinctly embodied and emotional aspect. The body of ‘sensibility’ encompassed these apparently disparate strands and was associated with terms including ‘sentimental’, ‘sentiment’, ‘sense’, ‘sensation’, and ‘sympathy’.
Author | : Roman Alexander Barton |
Publisher | : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
Total Pages | : 220 |
Release | : 2020-07-20 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 3110625318 |
How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result, the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy. Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its literary and moral potential.
Author | : Richard Meek |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 303 |
Release | : 2023-04-13 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 1009280279 |
This is the first comprehensive study of sympathy in the early modern period, providing a deeply researched and interdisciplinary examination of its development in Anglophone literature and culture. It argues that the term sympathy was used to refer to an active and imaginative sharing of affect considerably earlier than previous critical and historical accounts have suggested. Investigating a wide range of texts and genres, including prose fiction, sermons, poetic complaint, drama, political tracts, and scientific treatises, Richard Meek demonstrates the ways in which sympathy in the period is bound up with larger debates about society, religion, and identity. He also reveals the extent to which early modern emotions were not simply humoral or grounded in the body, but rather relational, comparative, and intertextual. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Renaissance literature and history, the history of emotions, and the history and philosophy of science.
Author | : Janet Todd |
Publisher | : Taylor & Francis |
Total Pages | : 145 |
Release | : 2024-05-01 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 1040025455 |
The cult of sensibility jangled the nerves of Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. It touched all literary genres and brought into prominence those qualities of tenderness, compassion, sympathy and irrational benevolence associated with women by the binary psychology of the time. It privileged spontaneous emotion and found this expressed in the bodily manifestations of tears, fainting fits, flushes and palpitations. Valuing the pure victim, it took as its archetypes the innocent dying Clarissa and the benevolent, suffering man of feeling. In Sensibility, originally published in 1986, Janet Todd charts the growth and decline of sentimental writing as a privileged mode in the eighteenth century. She shows how sentimental writing is riven with contradictions: while it applauds fellowship, it also expresses a yearning for isolation, and while it stresses the ties of friendship and family, it does so at the expense of sexual feeling, which grows menacing and destructive. By the 1770s, as the idea of sensibility was losing ground, ‘sentimentality’ came in as a pejorative term. Janet Todd ends her study of sensibility by detailing the various attacks on the cult, from radicals and conservatives, feminists and Christian moralists; from Coleridge who saw it as unmanning the nation to Jane Austen who considered it an elaborate sham
Author | : Albert J. Rivero |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 259 |
Release | : 2019-03-21 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 1108418929 |
Provides twenty-first century readers with a new, comprehensive and suggestive account of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century.
Author | : C. Packham |
Publisher | : Springer |
Total Pages | : 255 |
Release | : 2012-01-31 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 0230368395 |
This book offers an important account of the relationship between science and culture in the eighteenth century. It examines the 'vitalist' turn in physiology and natural philosophy, and its presence and effect in the burgeoning of philosophical and scientific inquiry of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the radical politics and culture of the 1790s.
Author | : A. Wetmore |
Publisher | : Springer |
Total Pages | : 313 |
Release | : 2013-11-19 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 1137346345 |
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?
Author | : Wendy Anne Lee |
Publisher | : Stanford University Press |
Total Pages | : 360 |
Release | : 2018-12-18 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 150360747X |
This book recovers the curious history of the "insensible" in the Age of Sensibility. Tracking this figure through the English novel's uneven and messy past, Wendy Anne Lee draws on Enlightenment theories of the passions to place philosophy back into conversation with narrative. Contemporary critical theory often simplifies or disregards earlier accounts of emotions, while eighteenth-century studies has focused on cultural histories of sympathy. In launching a more philosophical inquiry about what emotions are, Failures of Feeling corrects for both of these oversights. Proposing a fresh take on emotions in the history of the novel, its chapters open up literary history's most provocative cases of unfeeling, from the iconic scrivener who would prefer not to and the reviled stock figure of the prude, to the heroic rape survivor, the burnt-out man-of-feeling, and the hard-hearted Jane Austen herself. These pivotal cases of insensibility illustrate a new theory of mind and of the novel predicated on an essential paradox: the very phenomenon that would appear to halt feeling and plot actually compels them. Contrary to the assumption that fictional investment relies on a richness of interior life, Lee shows instead that nothing incites the passions like dispassion.