The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century

Albert J. Rivero

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781108418928
• eBook ISBN: 9781108314442
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As a literary genre, the sentimental novel reached the height of its vogue in the 1770s and 1780s and was still popular as the eighteenth century drew to a close. This volume presents a comprehensive exploration of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century, beginning with its origins in the so-called amatory fiction of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Chapters from leading scholars combine the various aspects and contexts of the genre, from politics, slavery, women writers, and the Gothic to the sentimental novel in America, France and Germany, with historically informed close readings of novels by writers including Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), Laurence Sterne (1713–68) and Jane Austen (1775–1817). This volume demonstrates that the sentimental novel continues to engage readers and critics and that, far from being obsolete or only of antiquary interest, it remains a vibrant and exciting area of study.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Sentimental Novel and Politics
• Chapter 2 Sensible Readers: Experiments in Feeling in Early Prose Fiction by Women
• Chapter 3 Reading for the Sentiment: Richardson’s Novels
• Chapter 4 The Virtuous in Distress: David Simple, Amelia, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph
• Chapter 5 Sentiment from Abroad: French Novels after 1748
• Chapter 6 Sterne’s Sentimental Empiricism
• Chapter 7 Virtue Not Rewarded: The Man of Feeling and The Sorrows of Young Werther
• Chapter 8 Slavery and the Novel of Sentiment
• Chapter 9 Sentiment and the Gothic: Failures of Emotion in the Novels of Mrs Radcliffe and the Minerva Press
• Chapter 10 The Sentimental Novel in America: The History of Emily Montague, Charlotte Temple, The Power of Sympathy, The Coquette
• Chapter 11 Novel Anachronisms: Sophia Lee’s The Life of a Lover and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer
• Chapter 12 Jane Austen and the Sentimental Novel
• Select Bibliography
• Index