Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature [electronic resource] : Touching Fiction

Analysing texts by Sterne, Smollett, Brooke, and Mackenzie, this book offers a new perspective on a question that literary criticism has struggled with for years: why are many sentimental novels of the 1700s so pervasively and playfully self-conscious, and why is this self-consciousness so often directed toward the materiality of the printed word? "Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature" offers a new perspective on the interplay of sentimentalism and self-reflexivity in novels by Sterne, Smollett, Mackenzie, and Henry Brooke. Rather than evidence of eighteenth-century literature's capacity to anticipate (post)modernist metafiction, or an indicator of underlying tensions at the heart of sentimental fiction, self-reflexive practices in these texts, this book argues, can best be accounted for as strategies of 'corporeal defamiliarization.' These strategies denaturalize printed books as intimate things to be felt, whose powers reside not in their transportative potential as windows onto imagined worlds, but in their more tangible properties as physical objects that inspire physiological effects Front Matter....Pages i-x Introductory Matter: Structuring Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Fiction....Pages 1-25 Body/Language....Pages 26-67 Feeling/Machines....Pages 68-101 Public/Health....Pages 102-146 Concluding Matter: Tear-blotted Texts and Men of Feeling in the 1790s....Pages 147-164 Afterword....Pages 165-171 Back Matter....Pages 172-207