Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680-1810

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AMS Press, 2007 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 239 pages
A pioneering assessment of the history of the English novel, Stephen Ahern's new study Affected Sensibilities reconsiders the role played by the early British novel in the shift from a culture of libertinism during the Restoration and its aftermath, to a culture of sentimentality from mid-century through the beginnings of Romanticism. In a perceptive series of essays on prose narratives, the author develops the provocative thesis that the amatory, sentimental, and Gothic fictional forms that dominate the marketplace in the early years of the novel are deeply connected by a concern with sensibility, a capacity for living intensely that is largely determined by class and gender.

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Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS
7
Romantic Excess
53
Sternes
93
Copyright

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