Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print) - Hardcover

Ildiko Csengei

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230308449 ISBN 13: 9780230308442

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Synopsis

What makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of the benevolent, compassionate ideology of eighteenth-century sensibility? This book explores forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swoons and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century literary, philosophical and scientific texts.

About this title

About the Author:

ILDIKO CSENGEI Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UKand Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Newnham College, Cambridge, UK. Previously she taught at the University of Southampton, UK,and held an R.A. Butler Research Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Her articles on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature appeared in Modern Language Review, Romantic Circles PraxisSeries and Studies in Romanticism.

Review:

'In Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, Ildiko Csengei offers an important account of the innate ambivalence of sensibility: the hidden intimacy between sympathy and cruelty, and between delicate feeling and feeling’s failures. Mingling innovative readings of important yet relatively neglected works such as Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling with rigorous considerations of philosophical and medical history, Csengei details how sensibility emerges in intimate relation to debates about the status of self-interest in human motivation and about the relationship of life to the liveliness of the senses. She shows how these questions came to inflect the study of punishment, the ethics of scientific experimentation, and the question of the pleasures involved in gazing on suffering. The book makes a compelling case for the ethical urgency of rethinking our notions of subjectivity, otherness, and spectatorship through eighteenth-century intellectual history.' - Miranda Burgess, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia, Canada

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0230308449
• ISBN 13: 9780230308442
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280