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This volume explores various aspects and contexts for thinking about the sentimental novel. Chapters from leading scholars investigate the genre through the lenses of politics, slavery, women writers and the Gothic, to the sentimental novel in America and France.
List of contents
Introduction Albert J. Rivero; 1. The sentimental novel and politics Gary Kelly; 2. Sensible readers: experiments in feeling in early prose fiction by women Ros Ballaster; 3. Reading for the sentiment: Richardson's novels Bonnie Latimer; 4. The virtuous in distress: David Simple, Amelia, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph Barbara M. Benedict; 5. Sentiment from abroad: French novels after 1748 Gillian Dow; 6. Sterne's sentimental empiricism Jonathan Lamb; 7. Virtue not rewarded: The Man of Feeling and The Sorrows of Young Werther Maureen Harkin; 8. Slavery and the novel of sentiment Brycchan Carey; 9. Sentiment and the Gothic: failures of emotion in the novels of Mrs Radcliffe and the Minerva Press Hannah Doherty Hudson; 10. The sentimental novel in America: The History of Emily Montague, Charlotte Temple, The Power of Sympathy, The Coquette Joseph F. Bartolomeo; 11. Novel anachronisms: Sophia Lee's The Life of a Lover and Frances Burney's The Wanderer Melissa Sodeman; 12. Jane Austen and the sentimental novel Albert J. Rivero; Select bibliography; Index.
Summary
This volume explores various aspects and contexts for thinking about the sentimental novel. Chapters from leading scholars investigate the genre through the lenses of politics, slavery, women writers and the Gothic, to the sentimental novel in America and France.
Additional text
'… this collection is well worth having on one's shelf, offering as it does much to both new and established scholars concerning the long history, complex aesthetics, and ambivalent politics of the sentimental narrative mode. So much has been written over the past few decades on the sentimental novel in English that it would be reasonable to think little new could be added and yet this coherent collection produced by scholars at the top of their game offers fresh perspectives, often eloquent readings, and a lot for the rest of us to build on.' Stephen Ahern, Project Muse
