Vicarious Narratives - A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750-1850

List of contents

• Introduction Defining Sympathy


• 1: 1759 and 1794: Moral Sentiments, Political Revolution, and Narrative Form


• 2: Letters in the Novel and the Novel in Letters: Henry Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigné and the Afterlife of the Epistolary Novel Roubigné and the Afterlife of the Epistolary Novel


• 3: Laurence Sterne in the Romantic Anthology


• 4: The Ends of Kinship in the French Romantic Novel


• 5: Novelistic Sympathy in Frankenstein


• 6: Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel


• Coda

About the author

Jeanne Britton is a Curator in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches literature courses that incorporate original print materials. Her interests include the novel, histories and theories of the emotions, the history of science, and book history.

Summary

Studies the experiences of sympathy that literary characters share with each other and argues that between 1750 and 1850, key works of British and French fiction generated a specific version of sympathy by manipulating traditional narrative forms and new publication practices in response to the Enlightenment.

Additional text

What Britton has accomplished is compelling if taken on its own terms. For readers attuned to political consequence yet a bit weary of the symptomatic reading, a refocusing of our attention on form is refreshing, especially in a study that teases out at a deep structural level the interconnected logics of literary form and sympathy as both philosophical notion and cultural good... Any scholar interested in the long Romantic century should pick up this insightful and original book.

Product details

• Authors: Jeanne M. Britton, Jeanne M. (Curator Britton
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 26.09.2019
• EAN: 9780198846697
• ISBN: 978-0-19-884669-7
• No. of pages: 248
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 18th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800, Western philosophy: Enlightenment, Early 19th century c 1800 to c 1850, Later 18th century c 1750 to c 1799