| The sentimental novels which came to dominate the British presses from the 1760s through 1800 were frequently dismissed as trash, but their portraits of excessive emotionality raised alarms about the fate of characters, and by proxy readers, who felt too strongly, too indiscriminately, and too much. As opposed to seeing them as justifiably forgotten cultural artifacts, this dissertation suggests that eighteenth-century sentimental novels interrogate, perform, and embody the movements of sympathy theorized by Smith, Hume, Burke, and others. I argue that what modern readers commonly identify as sentimental excess contains the residue of many neighboring cultural discourses which themselves brush up against excess too closely for eighteenth-century comfort. Literary sentimentality draws not only from theories of sympathy, benevolence, and fellow-feeling, but invokes physiological models of bodily excess like the single tear and the rules surrounding physical rhetoric that are defined within oratorical manuals in an attempt to instill limits around the individual pursuit and collective transfer of potentially contagious emotion. A sentimental novel like Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality resonated in surprising ways with contemporary readers: chosen for abridgement by both John Wesley and Mary Hays, its embrace of feeling leads its readers to detect strains of mysticism, Methodism, and other disturbing enthusiasms. Novels like the oft-mentioned but seldom-studied Excessive Sensibility, The Curse of Sentiment, and Plain Sense purport to condemn the sentimentality that they trade in, but contain a conflicting message: that sentiment is both a virtue and a failing, a social blessing that must nevertheless be kept in check by individual discipline and objectification. Finally, I read Ann Radcliffe's novels as retaining their stylistic and plot-based debts to sentimentalism while simultaneously embracing the trappings of the Gothic and the excessive potential of the sublime. Radcliffe's version of the Gothic doesn't adopt the sublime in order to replace the sentimental, but uses the sublime as an instrument to interrupt unproductive and solipsistic sentimentality. The increasingly expansive powers of the sublime---especially as it is personified within characters like The Italian's Schedoni---lends it the kind of power and flexibility that the sentimental must increasingly keep in check. |
