| This dissertation examines the influence of the literary and cultural movement of Sensibility from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the Romantic backlash of the early nineteenth century. It argues that literary works conventionally deemed Romantic incorporate the paradoxical logic and stylistic excesses of the tradition of Sensibility into their underlying structure. Beginning with Laurence Sterne, whose innovations provide a catalyst for later developments, the chapters explore the ways in which William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Mary and Percy Shelley, Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Alfred, Lord Tennyson work both within and against the tradition of Sensibility. In their varied responses to the oscillating forms of pleasure engendered by eighteenth-century manifestations of Sensibility like Sterne's, these writers forge literary projects fueled by an increasingly disciplined and disciplinary notion of desire. Marked by forms of self-discipline, Romantic desire provides a dynamic conceptual framework that also works to establish increasingly well-demarcated disciplinary divisions---of period, genre, and gender---for an emergent field of canonical literature as well as its formal study through criticism.; This study argues that the discursive infrastructure of Romanticism is built on the shifting ground of Sensibility and its primary features of excess, mixture, and mobility. It contends that despite significant attempts to discredit it, Sensibility does not disappear during the powerful attacks of the politically turbulent 1790s. Instead, it 'goes underground,' becoming embedded in texts that seek to promote pleasure's powerfully attractive effects for social regeneration in the midst of a particularly unstable historical moment, especially during the period framed by the post-Revolution Terror and the Napoleanic wars. In attending to this play of cultural forces, the project radically reinterprets the relationship between Sensibility and Romanticism and thus the transition from eighteenth-century to nineteenth-century literature. It also offers a different way of analyzing the relation of aesthetic revolutions to the traditions from which they emerge, stressing that there is less of a break between such traditions than a dynamic and complex development of their shared energies and formal structures. Ultimately, it argues that Romanticism is a later mode in the ongoing development of the long tradition of Sensibility. |
