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The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Albert J. Rivero (review)
Ist Teil von
Studies in the Novel, 2021-07, Vol.53 (2), p.195-198
Ort / Verlag
Denton: Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2021
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Project MUSE
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Maureen Harkin too takes up the checkered fortunes of the sentimental ideal in “Virtue Not Rewarded: The Man of Feeling and The Sorrows of Young Werther,” advancing the provocative claim that the portrayals of Mackenzie’s Harley and Goethe’s Werther—two notable martyrs to excessive sensibility—reveal “the authors’ sense not only that the feelings cultivated by sentimental fiction do not benefit their objects, but that there is no direct relation to action or a public sphere at all” (135). First laying out a concise history of criticism in this line, Latimer shows how central what she terms “purposeful reading” (57) is to Richardson’s project. Building on recent scholarship on reading as experimental learning, Ballaster notes how in amatory fictions “narrators pay close and unusual attention to the modulation of feeling in both protagonist and reader” (34). In Bartolomeo’s insightful readings we see the conservative tendencies of the sentimental ethos play out, as in all four of these novels—though written late in the lifecycle of the genre and set in other climes—characters of feeling replicate elitist assumptions about gender and class, and we see rehearsed a theme that had given a didactic drift to the genre from the start: the need to temper a reactive sensibility with the dictates of reason.