Description
Book SynopsisAbove all, sentimental texts used emotion as an important form of social and cultural distinction, as the attribution of sentience and feeling helped to define who would be recognized as human.
Trade ReviewThoroughly researched and densely annotated, this is a book for scholars of 18th century literature, culture, society, and ideas. Choice 2007 Festa's supple prose serves her well... She is capable both of the judicious concession... and the head-on confrontation. -- Deidre Lynch Studies in English Literature 2007 Engaging and erudite book. -- Jennifer Pitts American Historical Review 2008 There is great originality in this book, and even where we find what oft was thought, it's rarely so well expressed. -- Cynthia Wall Eighteenth-Century Life 2009 As a comparative cultural history, Professor Festa's study offers a sound and especially persuasive argument for researching from the early modern era the emerging social relationships between the self and the objectified other in relation to empire, whether in the sentimental novel or elsewhere. -- Christine Clark-Evans Comparative Literature Studies 2008 Most memorable for unearthing the volatile politics of the sentimental form. -- Roxann Wheeler Scriblerian 2008 Festa's account of the shortcomings (and the strengths) of imperialist benevolence in the eighteenth century is unusually deft and lucid. -- Carolyn Vellenga Berman Novel 2007 Sentimental Figures is, put simply, a terrific book, and perhaps most especially so in the willingness of its author, Lynn Festa, to consider groundbreaking subject matter... in at once theoretically astute and historically nuanced ways. -- Abby L. Coykendall 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries 2008 A beautifully written and compellingly argued book about 'the margins of the Enlightenment.' -- Cynthia Wall Eighteenth-Century Life 2009 A remarkable scholarly and theoretical achievement... original and powerful. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2010
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Great World Without
1. The Distinction of Sentimental Feeling
Sentimental Babel
Hume, Smith, and the Property of Feeling
French Sympathy and the Model of the Human
The Sentimental Wealth of Nations
Romance, Epic, and the Sentimental Rewriting of Eighteenth-Century Empire
2. Sterne's Snuffbox
Yorick's Snuffbox and the Paradox of the Sentimental Commodity
Emotions in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Tristram Shandy and the Befetish'd Word
The Sentimental Deficit and the Journal to Eliza
3. Tales Told by Things
The People Things Make
The Commodity's Soliloquy
Thinking Through Things
Subject and Object in Olaudah Equiano's Life
4. Making Humans Human
Of Price and Men
Day, Cowper, Wedgwood, and the Tropes of Redundant Personification
Discriminating Figures in Janet Schaw's Journal
Political Sympathies and the Sympathetic Misfire
Usurpation and Empathy in Parliamentary Debates
Reversible Figures
5. Global Commerce in Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes
Commerce as the Motor of the World
Lachrymose Intolerance
Human Interest
Coda: The Peripheral Vision of the Enlightenment
Notes
Works Cited
Index
