Sympathy, sensibility and the literature of feeling in the eighteenth century / Ildiko Csengei.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Csengei, Ildiko, 1975-

Series:

Palgrave studies in the Enlightenment, romanticism and cultures of print

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Senses and sensation in literature.

Literature, Modern--18th century--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Sympathy in literature.

Sociolinguistics--History--18th century.

Sociolinguistics.

History.

Physical Description:

xii, 261 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Summary:

Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century asks what makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of sensibility - a cultural trend of compassion, benevolence and humanitarianism in the eighteenth century. Csengei undertakes to investigate the darker side of sensibility by exploring forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swooning and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century contexts. The book offers fresh interpretations of core literary texts of sensibility (by Sarah Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry Mackenzie), works by its most central philosophers (Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith), medical writings about sympathy, sensibility and irritability (Albrecht von Haller, Robert Whytt and La Mettrie), late eighteenth-century critiques of sensibility by Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Inchbald, along with William Godwin's papers, letters and diary. It also explores connections between eighteenth-century forms of feeling and more recent sciences of the psyche from psychoanalysis to the neurosciences. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Philosophies and Physiologies of Feeling 27

1 Philosophies of Sympathy 29

Sympathy and the debate on human nature 32

The mechanism of sympathy 39

Healing sensibility and the sympathetic bond: 'The Story of La Roche' 44

Sympathetic identification: Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments 50

Sympathy's legacies: empathy, transference, psychoanalysis 62

2 The Feeling Machine 75

'King Chaunticlere', the guillotine and the politics of physiology 75

Minds, bodies, and machines: La Mettrie's Machine Man 86

Albrecht von Haller: irritability, sensibility and the body in pain 100

Robert Whytt and the aesthetics of pain 106

Coda: the crying tropes of sensibility 112

Part II The Literature of Sensibility 119

3 'I Will Not Weep': Tears of Sympathy in Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling 121

The limits of tears 121

Mirroring minds in eighteenth-century thought 126

The man of feeling and the poor 129

Madness and the man of feeling 135

4 Women and the Negative: The Sentimental Swoon in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 140

Introduction: medicine, psychoanalysis, and the swoon 140

'Pronouncing the Word No': silenced negations in Sarah Fielding's The History of Ophelia 146

Missed encounters in Rousseau's Julie, or the New Heloise 153

Negative affirmation in Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story 160

5 Godwin's Case: Melancholy Mourning in the 'Empire of Feeling' 169

Godwin and Wollstonecraft: destructive correspondences 172

'Genuine sentiments' and Godwin's diary 181

Memoirs: the crypt of writing 189.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-256) and index.

ISBN:

9780230308442

0230308449

OCLC:

748328733