The Limits of Sympathy: Animals and Sentimentality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, 1759--1810

he histories of moral concern for animals and literary sentimentalism are intertwined, yet the reasons for this connection have been little understood. This study examines the reasons for the growth of compassion for animals in late eighteenth-century British literature and culture and the influence of sentimental poetics on the way human and animal relationships came to be understood. Additionally, I suggest that some of the questions asked about animals in the eighteenth century are now being reconsidered in the field of Animal Studies and that modern thinking about human and animal relationships bears the influence of eighteenth-century sentimentalism in both the importance placed on sympathetic imagination and, surprisingly, our disapproval of sentimentality.;The Introduction considers the rise and fall of sentimental compassion for animals in eighteenth-century Britain and examines the iconic importance of the animal encounters in Laurence Sterne's novels for eighteenth-century readers and how they epitomized the notion of sensibility for admirers and detractors. I then propose an approach to understanding the role of animals in sentimentalism that draws on Derrida's work on the gift and the response of the animal and appraise current attitudes toward sentimentality in the field of Animal Studies. Chapter 1 shows how Sterne used animal encounters to explore the dynamics of sympathetic imagination and examines how the conceptual malleability of animals and their resistance to interpretation bear on the novel's analysis of personal identity and narrative authority. Chapter 2 analyzes the major tropes of sentimental animal representation in a wide array of eighteenth-century texts, with a focus on understanding how personification and apostrophe shape the dynamics of the poetic encounter with the animal. Chapter 3 considers how William Blake's writings on animals may be understood in the context of sentimentalism and the ways in which Blake addressed questions about our ethical relations with other species. Chapter 4 outlines the intellectual context of eighteenth-century concern for animals with a focus on how moral philosophy and medical discourse established models of the mind-body relationship conducive to questioning the boundary between human and animal.