Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century

John Mullan

ISBN 10: 0198128657 / ISBN 13: 9780198128656

Editore: Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988

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8vo pp. 261, "This study examines the autobiographical writing of Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and David Hume, who chronicled the peculiarly intimate relationships between the texts they produced and the social lives they lived. Each relied on a language of feeling to represent social bonds they considered necessary, discovering, through their writing, a sociability dependent on? Codice articolo 309088

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Titolo: Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of ...

Casa editrice: Clarendon Press, Oxford

Data di pubblicazione: 1988

Legatura: Rilegato

Condizione: Very Good

Condizione sovraccoperta: Very Good, spine faded

Tipologia articolo: book

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto:

This is a study of the rise of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century, which was also the rise of sentimentalism - a fashion for the celebration of extreme sensibilities. While the fondness for sentiment embarrassed later literary criticism, it originally legitimated a morally suspect phenomenon: the novel. This book describes that legitimation and looks beyond novels in an attempt to understand sentimentalism as the expression of a culture's anxiety about the nature of social relations. A language of feeling is shown to be the resource of philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith, as much as novelists like Richardson and Sterne. In fiction and philosophy it speaks of a perceived lack of contact between private and public expressions of sociability. To understand how this perception leads novelists to associate virtuous feeling with disabling suffering, the work also looks at 18th century discussions of nervous disorder where, as in many novels, sensibility becomes illness. In the connection between fiction and other examinations of the private self, sentimentalism is seen as the symptom of a civilization's deepest discontents. The work is designed to be of value to scholars, graduates, undergrates studying eighteenth century English literature - particularly the novel, some social historians and historians of philosophy.

L'autore:

John Mullan is at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.