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

by I. Csengei

Overview

What makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of the benevolent, compassionate ideology of eighteenth-century sensibility? This book explores forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swoons and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century literary, philosophical and scientific texts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349339044
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	01/01/2012
Series:	Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
Edition description:	1st ed. 2012
Pages:	261
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x (d)

About the Author

ILDIKO CSENGEI is aLeverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK and Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Newnham College, Cambridge, UK. Previously she taught at the University of Southampton, UK, and held an R.A. Butler Research Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Her articles on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature appeared in Modern Language Review, Romantic Circles Praxis Series and Studies in Romanticism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Sensibility from the Margins PART I: PHILOSOPHIES AND PHYSIOLOGIES OF FEELING Philosophies of Sympathy The Feeling Machine PART II: THE LITERATURE OF SENSIBILITY 'I Will Not Weep': Tears of Sympathy in Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling Women and the Negative: The Sentimental Swoon in Eighteenth-Century Fiction Godwin's Case: Melancholy Mourning in the 'Empire of Feeling' Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

Ildiko Csengei’s Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century is a capacious study of a topic that has and will continue to have broad interest for eighteenth-century scholars. … Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling is readable and engaging throughout and is supported both by extensive substantive notes and by a careful bibliography.” (Ann Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 28 (3), Spring, 2016)

"Ildiko Csengei's Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century . . . addresses the overlap between philosophy, psychology, and medicine . . . Many of the authors covered by Csengei are familiar figures in the canons of sensibility - Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, Richardson, Mackenzie, Rousseau - but careful yet imaginative readings offer new insights." - Years' Work in English Studies

From the Publisher