Affected sensibilities : romantic excess and the genealogy of the novel, 1680-1810
"This book offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of the history of the English novel. Ahern 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. In all three of these fictional forms, a pervasive yet ambivalent unease over intense feeling testifies to the persistence of a conflicted romantic aesthetic well into the second century in the history of the novel"--Jacket
AMS studies in the eighteenth century, no. 49, no. 49]
Criticism, interpretation, etc
239 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
9780404635497, 0404635490
56753478
1. Toward a genealogy of sensibility narrative
2. "Glorious ruine" : romantic excess and the politics of sensibility in Behn's Love-letters
3. "Those trembling aking transports" : the erotics of sympathy in Haywood's Love in excess
4. "The distress of plenty" : Sterne's ethic of excess and A Sentimental journey
5. "Eloquent beyond the power of language" : staging sentimental communion in Mackenzie's The Man of feeling
6. Disciplining the sensible self : dialectics of passion and reason in Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
7. Disenchanting sentimentality : Lewis's The Monk, moral agency, and the lie of romance
8. Epilogue "Do you think me most a knave or a fool?" : Austen, anti-romance, and the language of the heart
Series from jacket