Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling [Hardcover]

Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling defends feeling against customary distrust or condescension by showing that the affective turn of the eighteenth-century cult of sentiment, despite its sometimes surreal manifestations, has led to a positive culture of feeling. The very reaction against sentimentalism has taught us to identity sentimentality. Fiction, moreover, remains a principal means not just of discriminating quality of feeling but of appreciating its essentially imaginative nature.List of Abbreviations Introduction: The Transformations of Sentiment 'Affective Individualism' and the Cult of Sentiment Feeling and/as Fiction: Illusion, Absorption and Emotional Quixotry Friedrich Schiller and the Aestheticising of Sentiment William Wordsworth: The Man of Feeling, Recollected Emotion, and 'the Sentiment of Being' Victorian Sentimentality: The Dialectic of Sentiment and Truth of Feeling Feeling as Illusion: Rousseau to Proust Modernism and the Critique of Sentimentality Henry James and D.H. Lawrence: 'Felt Life' and Truth to Feeling Conclusion: Literature, Criticism and the Culture of Feeling Notes Bibliography Index

'Michael Bell has long been our finest analyst of the 'culture of feeling', from the Eighteenth century to the present. No one has written with more insight on the concepts of sentiment and sensibility, or better understood the richly nuanced history of these words. Bell writes with a disciplined respect for ideas, a philosophic clarity and rigour rare among literary critics, and an alert wisdom. Like his previous books, Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling shows exceptionally wide reading across all the major Western literatures, as well as a deep understanding of the English literary tradition. It is written with remarkable energy of mind and delicacy of perception, and with a powerful synthesising grasp of a rich body of literature.' - Claude Rawson, Maynard Mack Professor of English, Yale University