Provides twenty-first century readers with a new, comprehensive and suggestive account of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century.

Publisher description

In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and

Reveals a fascinating history of aesthetic debate concerning the emotional and moral functions of artWhen did the sentimental start to mean aawful? Why are so m

This study of sensibility in the eighteenth-century English novel discusses literary representations of suffering and responses to it in the social and scientif