Sentimental Novel

9 Key excerpts on "Sentimental Novel"

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  The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century

  • Albert J. Rivero(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  During this journey the protagonist’s identity as self-reflexive sovereign subject is formed and/or tested in a series of encounters with unfamiliar abstract systems and chronotopes typically dominated by the more powerful, and by challenges of risk and trust in the face of such inequity. After a variable number of similar vicissitudes the protagonist is usually rewarded by re-embedding in a modern habitus and home, and restoration of original social status and property or bestowal of better ones, often by a deus ex machina. Here was a political myth or story explaining and protesting inequities of power felt in everyday life, for a readership that, judging by the cost of buying or borrowing modern novels, mainly comprised the middling sort, who were largely excluded from politics in the older sense of governing structures, institutions and social networks. Such people would obtain most of their novels from commercial circu- lating libraries. These libraries’ catalogues from the 1760s through the rest of the century list numerous Sentimental Novels, whether so labelled or not, alongside earlier amatory and scandal fiction and comic, humorous, adven- ture and satirical novels past and contemporary, indicating the breadth of borrowers’ interests and producers’ and suppliers’ relentless market- probing. In this populous field modern novels could be identified or assignified as sentimental in different ways for various reasons. ‘Sentimental Novel’ occurred rarely in the period’s print record. At a time when title-pages were advertisements, the term ‘sentimental’ or ‘sensibility’ appeared in a few novels’ titles, in some fiction marketing, and in titles of a wide variety of other kinds of print. This is identification by producers. There were numerous eighteenth-century novels not titled or marketed as sentimental but that seem to have been assignifiable as more or less sentimental.

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  A Mirror for History

  How Novels and Art Reflect the Evolution of Middle-Class America

  • Marc Egnal(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Univ Tennessee Press

    (Publisher)

  3 These families, and particularly the wives and daughters, relished the widening flood of novels. Much of this fiction, such as the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe, had a rural setting. In the towns, the “middling folk” who visited galleries and exhibits enjoyed the work of landscape painters, including Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt. Any exploration of the period must look more closely into two questions: What exactly was sentimentality? And what dates demarcate the era? Observers agree that sentimental literature involves heightened emotions, often including a flood of tears. “Characters in Sentimental Novels,” notes Cindy Weinstein, “cry for all sorts of reasons: they have lost a child or a parent, seen a loved one fall from spiritual grace, endured cruel treatment. . . . There is indeed a contagion of weeping, but the targeted weeper is, of course, the reader.” 4 One indication of the high-water mark and gradual ebb of sentimentalism rests with the frequency of weep, which crested in the mid-1840s and declined in the following decades (fig. p1.1). Still, a full understanding of the era and of sentimental literature and art, must move beyond tears, and focus on “heightened emotions.” That broader definition encompasses the anguished protagonists of the early national period; the seekers and lofty heroes in novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville; and the sentimentality that marked many of the books published after midcentury. Scholars underscore other aspects of this literature. Some critics pronounce this outlook (as David Reynolds notes) “socially conservative.” Jane Tompkins remarks, “the fiction we label as ‘sentimental’ . . . . blots out the uglier details of life,” while Laura Wexler observes, “The energies [sentimentalism] developed were intended as a tool for the control of others.” In this reading, tears dissolved cries for change and turned anger inward.

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  The Gentleman Ideal

  • (Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Cuvillier Verlag

    (Publisher)

  6.3 Sensibility and Sentimentalism The cult of feelings, what is now generally known as sensibility, grew up as a reaction to rationalism and the harsh conditions of everyday life. It was a craving for feelings neither prevalent in rationalism nor of importance in the survival of the poor. “The emphasis on passion and instinct, as opposed to reason, led, it is clear, to the emergence of sentimentality as a governing factor in the literature of the time.” 11 It once more reiterated the belief in the innate goodness of man and became unbelievably popular. 182 The Sentimental Novel, the dominant literary form of the late eighteenth century, was innovative as a form largely because it attached an unprecedented audience to literature. This readership was not only numerically larger than that previously attracted, it was also notable because it was made up of a new social alliance. The Sentimental Novel addressed women as much as men, and increasingly, those who belonged to the middle station of life, the social level between manual workers and the gentry that Dorothy Marshall characterised as ‘the Middling Sort’. 12 Consequently, it had much more influence on society than previ-ous forms of literature and as such played a decisive role in form-ing the acceptable manners of genteel society and portraying the gentleman ideal. There is often some confusion about the terms used in con-nection with sensibility: “Although closely related, sensibility and sentiment/ sentimental are in one respect easy to separate: sensibility is associated with the body, sentiment with the mind. The first is based on physical sensitivity and the processes of sensation; the second refers to a refinement of thought.” 13 However, the distinc-tions would seem to pale with frequent use: “In spite of the distinc-tions that can be identified, however, eighteenth-century writers and speakers were neither precise nor consistent.

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  Publishing the Family

  • June Howard, Donald E. Pease(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  The topic of sentimentality proves to refract, in terms of form, many of the same issues that have concerned me so far; and when I return at the end of the chapter to the collaborative novel, the results of my investigation prove to make a considerable difference in reading it, both helping us to link the authors What Is Sentimentality? 217 and their choices to literary history and alerting us to the significance of textual details. Embodied Thoughts One element never missing from the combinations that constitute sentimentality is an association with emotion. In stigmatizing usages, whether vernacular or expert, the emotion involved is characterized as either affected and shallow or as excessive. In Douglas’s account it is both—a suggestion less contradictory than it seems because counter-feit emotion may be feigned but is more commonly exaggerated. What is at stake is authenticity: the spontaneity, the sincerity, and the legiti-macy of an emotion are understood to be the same. This equivalence underpins commentary by defenders as well; Joanne Dobson, for ex-ample, argues that sentimental literature can be ‘‘an authentic mode of expressing valid human experience’’ (175). And it is striking how often one encounters, in the midst of a critical essay that takes a generally favorable view of women’s literature, a sentence in which sentimen-tality is implicitly contrasted with raw, real emotion. Habits of mind based on an opposition between manipulated sen-timent and genuine emotion are, in fact, deeply inconsistent with the social constructionism currently prevailing in the humanities. Yet each of us is a layperson as well as an expert, and according to the com-mon sense of the modern world, feelings well up naturally inside indi-viduals—tropes of interiority and self-expression are difficult to resist. Everyday language also has neutral ways of indicating shaped emotion, of course.

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  A Sentimental Education

  • Hannah McGregor(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wilfrid Laurier University Press

    (Publisher)

  We can and do read sentiment- ally. A favourite childhood book, for example, may be read through the lens of your emotional attachment to it. But we can also read sentimental narratives unsentimentally—as critics do when they read against the grain of Sentimental Novels—to A S E N T I M E N T A L E D U C A T I O N 8 better understand their cultural work. What sentimental read- ings and sentimental texts have in common is the framing of sentimentality itself as feminized and emotional. Sentimentality has historically been disparaged in such a self-evidently misogynist way that attempts at feminist recov- ery were inevitable, and it continues to be disdained and cele- brated by turns. Scholars Kelly McWilliam and Sharon Bickle, for example, point to how sentimental texts have functioned historically to create empathy that, in turn, moulded cultural values; the sentimental, for them, is particularly useful in the context of education, since it’s so good at making people care about things they may not have cared about before (2017, 84). Kyla Schuller agrees that sentimentality has a pedagogical function but disagrees that it’s teaching anything good. Instead, she reads it as a technology of whiteness that, in the nine- teenth century, helped to produce an understanding of white people as the sole representatives of civilization because of a heightened capacity for sympathetic feeling (2018, 2). In The Biopolitics of Feeling, Schuller unpacks the role sentimentality played in the invention of race and sex—a history that’s worth spending a little more time with. Schuller’s work explores the concept of impressibility which, in keeping with nineteenth-century theories of bio- logical race, was understood as a characteristic associated with whiteness: it essentially meant that white people were malleable, capable of evolving, and thus uniquely capable of civility (2018, 7).

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  Novel Beginnings

  Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

  • Patricia Meyer Spacks(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  the particular form of consciousness that we encounter in A Sentimental Journey attracted such interest in the eighteenth century that it generated a novelistic subgenre of its own. For several decades, the Sentimental Novel, or novel of sensibility, intended to arouse as well as to render sympathetic feelings, flourished in England (as well as on the Continent). Sentimental Novels assumed the individual and social impor-tance of sensitivity to the troubles of others. In addition to representing heroes, and occasionally heroines, of extraordinary responsiveness, they also commented on social institutions. One of the best-known examples of the form — better known, per-haps, for its apposite title than for its substance — occupies ninety-four sparsely printed pages in the Norton paperback edition. In that brief span it treats of seduction, prostitution, military service in India, depopulation, impressment into the army, place-seeking among the wealthy, and many other social and personal evils. The Man of Feeling (1769), a product of Henry Mackenzie’s youth, exemplifies the kinds of issue and the kind of protagonist that would abound as this subgenre flourished. Harley, the eponymous hero, is, from a worldly point of view, a fool. He understands nothing about how things are done; he lacks a canny eye to his own advantage. In these respects he resembles other figures glorified by the novel of sentiment. 17 chapter five The Novel of Sentiment 1 the novel of sentiment Mackenzie did not originate the form: well before he wrote, Sarah Fielding had produced David Simple (1744) and its sequel, Volume the Last (1753). Like Mackenzie’s Harley, David Simple is a naïf, unfamiliar with the ways of the world and astounded and appalled by the corruption he discovers. He too could be called, from a worldly perspective, a fool: he doesn’t know how to take care of himself.

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  English Novel, Vol II, The

  Smollett to Austen

  • Richard. W. F. Kroll, Richard W.F. Kroll(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 .  The ‘knowingness’ that Coleridge speaks of may be peculiar to Yorick among sentimental heroes, but it is a common feature of the third-person narrative voice in Sentimental Novels. Even in its naive or cliched forms, the Sentimental Novel brings together authors and readers significantly unlike its own heroes. The qualities that go to make up a sentimental hero are not those required to create or appreciate such a character, for much the same reason that pastorals are not written by or for the same sort of people they are about. Shepherds untainted by the world which authors and readers inhabit can express unreservedly, or embody with allegorical completeness, various ideals toward which the worldlings are at best ambivalent. The transaction between poet and reader must in some degree pass over the heads of the pastoral figures themselves. To endow them with knowingness would compromise their ability to hold, express, and act upon their views with utter singlemindedness. A penchant for unqualified commitment separates pastoral characters from their authors and readers as much as what they are committed to, and this tends to be true of sentimental heroes as well.

  6 .  Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 1967), pp. 219–65; R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York, 1974), p. 271f.

  7 .  On sentimental optimism vitiating or superseding satire, see Andrew M. Wilkinson, ‘The Decline of English Verse Satire in the Middle Years of the Eighteenth Century,’ RES, n.s. 3 (1952), 222–33, and Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (Oxford, 1965), pp. 22–24, and passim. On sentimental pessimism, Brissenden is most illuminating.

  8 .  One might suppose that a view of man as not

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  Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling

  • M. Bell(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  5 Victorian Sentimentality: the Dialectic of Sentiment and Truth of Feeling If the eighteenth century is remembered as the age of sentiment and sensibility, the Victorian period is usually considered the peak, or trough, of sentimentality. Victorian sentimentality is a byword for indulgent and lachrymose excess, and the reaction against it, as encapsulated in Oscar Wilde's remark that it would take a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing, was crucial to many writers of the modernist generation. It may be that literary criticism is not the best mode for considering the signi®cance of this cultural phenomenon. A popular culture of tears may serve an intuitively therapeutic purpose requiring simple triggers rather than artistically complex occasions. Nonetheless, literary texts, and contemporary ways of understanding them, are an especially signi®cant part of the Victorian culture of feeling and in recent years Victorian sentiment has been seen with greater sympathy, and internal discrimination, while the modernist response now seems an overreaction. But this critical turn in favour of sentiment still largely misses the process of transformation. Victorian sentimentalism grappled, creatively and self-critically, with the inherited problems of ethical sentiment and its great achievements are just as sentimentalist in their deeper derivation as the moments of excess. The implicit criterion of true feeling which developed within the tradition of sentiment cannot be fully disentangled from sentimentality in the pejorative sense. In the realm of feeling, the true and the false de®ne each other in a process of constant discrimination; true and false feeling have a dialectical relation. The recent sympathetic interest in nineteenth-century sentimental literature, therefore, requires some further discrimination.

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  Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century

  • I. Csengei(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The chapter will argue that the ‘man of feeling’ consists in an always shifting perspective; it is a technique of reading rather than a clearly defined character type. The sentimental feeling subject is insepa- rable from a reading practice that operates through emotional response. The tears of the man of feeling always mark ambivalent moments of sympathy, which are also staged in other novels of the period, includ- ing Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798). Novels of sentiment reflect critically on enlightenment theories of sympathy, where fellow-feeling unsettles the boundaries of the self and blurs the distinction between self and other. They warn us that moments of sympathy can cast doubt on true altruistic motive and can help maintain existing power structures. The ambivalent tears of sym- pathy, as we shall see, are the common concerns of eighteenth-century sensibility and intersubjective psychoanalytic theory. Mackenzie’s introductory chapter well illustrates how the novel of sensibility finds – and even produces – its own sympathetic readers. It positions the novel as a fragmented, damaged manuscript found by two unsuccessful hunters. The narrator and the curate, after the disappoint- ment of missing their prey, look around to contemplate the melancholy locale, and talk about a man called Harley who had once lived there. Here the curate presents his company with a bundle of papers used by him as wadding – papers that contain the history of Harley in whom the narrator has taken an interest: ‘I should be glad to see this medley’, said I. ‘You shall see it now’, answered the curate, ‘for I always take it along with me a-shooting’. ‘How came it so torn?’ ‘’Tis excellent wadding’, said the curate.

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