Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Clarendon Paperbacks)

This study examines the autobiographical writing of Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and David Hume, who chronicled the peculiarly intimate relationships between the texts they produced and the social lives they lived. Each relied on a language of feeling to represent social bonds they considered necessary, discovering, through their writing, a sociability dependent on the communication of passions and sentiments. This discovery, Mullan argues, played a critical role in the development of the eighteenth-century fiction now called sentimental.

This study examines the autobiographical writing of Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and David Hume, who chronicled the peculiarly intimate relationships between the texts they produced and the social lives they lived. Each relied on a language of feeling to represent social bonds they considered necessary, discovering, through their writing, a sociability dependent on the communication of passions and sentiments. This discovery, Mullan argues, played a critical role in the development of the 18th-century fiction now called "sentimental."

The rise of the novel in the mid-18th century was also the rise of sentimentalism. This study explores the attitudes which led novelists to associate virtuous feeling with disabling suffering. It also examines the role of women in fiction and in society during that period.