Political Affairs of the Heart

Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775-1800

Linda Van Netten Blimke

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781684484058, 9781684484065
• eBook ISBN: 9781684484072
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Richly researched and engagingly written, Political Affairs of the Heart traces the emergence of female sentimental travel writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, and posits its centrality to women's engagement with national and gender politics. This study examines four travel narratives written by women between 1774 and 1795, convincingly arguing that they effectively deploy the discourse of sensibility to engage with debates around Britain's national identity during the French and American Revolutions. Van Netten Blimke contends that Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768)—which first introduced sentimental discourse to the travelogue—facilitated women's gradual inclusion into this previously male-dominated genre, effectively paving the way for women to influence the country's sociopolitical transformation. These four previously understudied works successfully combine eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility to mount impassioned interventions in their nation's perception and practice of revolutionary politics, at a time when its national identity was most in flux.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Critical Contexts: Eighteenth-Century Women’s Travel Writing
• Part One: Mobile Feelings: Mapping the Sentimental Traveler
• Part Two: Divided Sympathies: Female Sentimental Travel Writers and the American Revolution
• Part Three: Sensibility in Distress: Female Sentimental Travel Writers and the French Revolution
• Epilogue: “An Affair of the Heart”
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author