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

John Mullan

ISBN 10: 0198128657 / ISBN 13: 9780198128656

Verlag: Oxford University Press, 1988

Beschreibung

Smokey smell present, otherwise very good condition. Blue cloth covered boards with gold spine titles; top edge dusty; jacket has mild wear and discoloration along edges and spine; 8vo - over 7 3/4" to 9 3/4" tall; previous owner's name on free front endpaper; 261 pages. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers TNS013

Bibliografische Details

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

Verlag: Oxford University Press

Erscheinungsdatum: 1988

Einband: Hardcover

Zustand: Good

Zustand des Schutzumschlags: Good

Über diesen Titel

Reseña del editor:

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.