Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Clarendon Paperbacks) - Softcover

Mullan, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198122527 ISBN 13: 9780198122524

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA, 1990

Synopsis

This study examines the autobiographical writing of Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and David Hume, who chronicled the peculiarly intimate relationships between the texts they produced and the social lives they lived. Each relied on a language of feeling to represent social bonds they considered necessary, discovering, through their writing, a sociability dependent on the communication of passions and sentiments. This discovery, Mullan argues, played a critical role in the development of the eighteenth-century fiction now called sentimental.

About this title

Review

'Mullan's prose is stylish ... and his argument compelling ... this is a remarkable study of sentimentalism.'Times Literary Supplement

'Mullan has provided a stimulating study which is not afraid to explore complex themes and be provocative in its judgements' Times Higher Education Supplement

'admirable study' Notes and Queries

'responsible, informed and thoughtful book' Yvonne Noble, British Journal of 18th Century Studies, 13:2

`Mullan's study is a valuable, sustained, and richly suggestive meditation on the essential ambiguity of the language of feeling. He deserves much credit for his refusal to talk reductively about a subject so complex ... I can highly recommend this book.'Eighteenth-Century Fiction

'absorbing study' English Studes

Mullan's book is an original and important contribution to the history of ideas. It offers brilliant and convincing reinterpretations kof Clarissa adn Tristam Shandy. (The Eighteenth Century)

Synopsis

With the rise of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century came the rise of sentimentalism. While the fondness for sentiment embarrassed later literary critics, it originally legitimized a morally suspect phenomenon: the novel. This book describes that legitimation, yet it looks beyond the narrowly literary to the lives and expressed philosophies of some of the major writers of the age, showing the language of feeling to be a resource of philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith, as much as novelists like Richardson and Sterne.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0198122527
• ISBN 13: 9780198122524
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272