The sentimental novel and politics / Gary Kelly -- Sensible readers: experiments in feeling in early prose fiction by women / Ros Ballaster -- Reading for the sentiment: Richardson's novels / Bonnie Latimer -- The virtuous in distress: David Simple, Amelia, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph / Barbara M. Benedict -- Sentiment from abroad: French novels after 1748 / Gillian Dow -- Sterne's sentimental empiricism / Jonathan Lamb -- Virtue not rewarded: the man of feeling and the Sorrows of Young Werther / Maureen Harkin -- Slavery and the novel of sentiment / Brycchan Carey -- Sentiment and the gothic: failures of emotion in the novels of Mrs Radcliffe and the Minerva Press / Hannah Doherty Hudson -- The sentimental novel in America: the history of Emily Montague, Charlotte Temple, The power of sympathy, the coquette / Joseph F. Bartolomeo -- Novel anachronisms: Sophia Lee's The life of a lover and Frances Burney's The wanderer / Melissa Sodeman -- Jane Austen and the sentimental novel / Albert J. Rivero.
Summary:
"This volume aims to present an authoritative and suggestive exploration of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century. Sentimental novels reached the height of their vogue in the 1770s and 1780s and were still popular in the 1790s. Their origins may be traced to the so-called amatory fiction published in France and Britain in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Samuel Richardson's spectacularly popular reworking of amatory fictional tropes, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), with its emphasis on feeling, sympathy and moral instruction, served as a catalyst for this literary movement"-- Provided by publisher.
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