Description
Book SynopsisUnfelt offers a new account of feeling during the British Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness, and patriotic ardor, James Noggle explores literary evocations of imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the period''s understanding of sensibility.
Each of the four sections of Unfelton philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political economycharts the development of these idioms from early in the long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith, Noggle''s exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the scope of affect in the p
Trade Review
Noggle's superlative study traces unfelt tributaries of affect that, though not immediately perceptible, nevertheless flow together into the kinds of sea-changes that we might call identity formation, character development, or, on a much larger scale, social evolution writ large.... Precise, forthright, and circumspect... Unfelt is a book for scholars of the long eighteenth century, and it unquestionably succeeds as such.
* Eighteenth-Century Fiction *
James Noggle's Unfelt offers both genealogy and endorsement. Unfelt is a densely theorized book.
* Modern Language Quarterly *
Noggle's account certainly represents one of the most careful dialogues I've seen yet between eighteenth-century literary studies and the broader Spinozist paradigm of affect theory.
* Eighteenth-Century Studies *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Unfelt Affect
1. Philosophy: Affective Nonconsciousness
1.1. The Insensible Parts of Locke's Essay
1.2. David Hartley's Ghost Matter
1.3. Vivacity and Insensible Association: Condillac and Hume
1.4. Sentiment and Secret Consciousness: Haywood and Smith
2. Fiction: Unfelt Engagement
2.1. Unfeeling before Sensibility
2.2. External and Invisible
2.3. Insensible against Involuntary in Burney
2.4. Austen as Coda
3. Historiography: Insensible Revolutions
3.1. The Force of the Thing: Unfelt Moeurs in French Historiography
3.2. The Insensible Revolution and Scottish Historiography
3.3. Gibbon in History
3.4. The Embrace of Unfeeling
4. Political Economy: Moving with Money
4.1. Mandeville and the Other Happiness
4.2. Feeling Untaxed
4.3. The Money Flow
4.4. Invisible versus Insensible
Epilogue: Insensible Emergence of Ideology
