Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

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2. Introduction: Sensibility from the Margins

   1. Introduction: Sensibility from the Margins

      • Ildiko Csengei

      Pages 1-26

3. Philosophies and Physiologies of Feeling

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 27-27

      PDF

   2. Philosophies of Sympathy

      • Ildiko Csengei

      Pages 29-74

   3. The Feeling Machine

      • Ildiko Csengei

      Pages 75-118

4. The Literature of Sensibility

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 119-119

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   2. ‘I Will Not Weep’: Tears of Sympathy in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling

      • Ildiko Csengei

      Pages 121-139

   3. Women and the Negative: The Sentimental Swoon in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

      • Ildiko Csengei

      Pages 140-168

   4. Godwin’s Case: Melancholy Mourning in the ‘Empire of Feeling’

      • Ildiko Csengei

      Pages 169-194

5. Back Matter

   Pages 195-261

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What makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of the benevolent, compassionate ideology of eighteenth-century sensibility? This book explores forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swoons and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century literary, philosophical and scientific texts.

• bibliography
• eighteenth century
• empire
• English literature
• fiction
• ideology
• literature
• philosophy
• sensibility
• violence
• women
• British and Irish Literature

“Ildiko Csengei’s Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century is a capacious study of a topic that has and will continue to have broad interest for eighteenth-century scholars. … Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling is readable and engaging throughout and is supported both by extensive substantive notes and by a careful bibliography.” (Ann Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 28 (3), Spring, 2016)

"Ildiko Csengei's Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century . . . addresses the overlap between philosophy, psychology, and medicine . . . Many of the authors covered by Csengei are familiar figures in the canons of sensibility - Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, Richardson, Mackenzie, Rousseau - but careful yet imaginative readings offer new insights." - Years' Work in English Studies

ILDIKO CSENGEI is aLeverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK and Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Newnham College, Cambridge, UK. Previously she taught at the University of Southampton, UK, and held an R.A. Butler Research Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Her articles on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature appeared in Modern Language Review, Romantic Circles Praxis Series and Studies in Romanticism.

Policies and ethics