The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th- and 19th-century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. Sentimentalism, which is to be distinguished from sensibility, was a fashion in both poetry and prose fiction beginning in the eighteenth century in reaction to the rationalism of the Augustan Age.
Sentimental novels relied on emotional response, both from their readers and characters. They feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance both emotions and actions. The result is a valorization of "fine feeling", displaying the characters as a model for refined, sensitive emotional effect. The ability to display feelings was thought to show character and experience, and to shape social life and relations. [1]
Among the most famous sentimental novels in English are Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1765–1670), Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) and Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800). Continental examples are Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel Julie, or the New Heloise , his autobiography The Confessions (1764–1770) and Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). [2] Tobias Smollett tried to imply a darker underside to the "cult of sensibility" in his The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). Another example of this type of novel is Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), wherein the heroine, while naturally good, in part for being country-raised, hones her politeness when, while visiting London, she is educated into propriety. This novel also is the beginning of "romantic comedy", though it is most appropriately labeled a conduct novel and a forerunner of the female Bildungsroman in the English tradition exemplified by later writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. [3]
While this genre is particularly associated with the second half of the 18th century, it continued in a modified form into the 19th century, especially in the works of Mrs Henry Wood, who is remembered especially for East Lynne (1861). [4] However, the question as to whether Charles Dickens is a sentimental novelist is more debatable. Valerie Purton in her 2012 book Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition, sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his "sentimental scenes and characters [are] as crucial to the overall power of the novels as his darker or comic figures and scenes", and that " Dombey and Son is ... Dickens's greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition". [5] [ full citation needed ] On the other hand, the Encyclopædia Britannica online comments, that despite "patches of emotional excess", such as the reported death of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843), "Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist". [4]
The first sentimental novel to be published in the United States, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy , appeared in 1791 and dealt with themes of nationhood, seduction, and incest. Hill's novel was followed by Hannah Webster Foster's immensely popular The Coquette , whose events were loosely based on the tragic biography of Massachusetts native Elizabeth Whitman, who gave birth to an illegitimate child and died soon after at a roadside tavern. The American sentimental novel achieved massive sales and popularity during the Antebellum era. Landmark examples include Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar (1869), and Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854). [6]
Sentimental novels also gave rise to the subgenre of domestic fiction in the early nineteenth century, commonly called conduct novels. The story's hero in domestic fiction is generally set in a domestic world and centers on a woman going through various types of hardship, and who is juxtaposed with either a foolish and passive or a woefully undereducated woman. [7] The contrast between the heroic woman's actions and her foils is meant to draw sympathy to the character's plight and to instruct them about expected conduct of women. The domestic novel uses sentimentalism as a tool to convince readers of the importance of its message. [8]
By the end of the 19th century, sentimental literature faced complaints about the abundance of "cheap sentiment" and its excessive bodily display. Critics, and eventually the public, began to see sentimentalism manifested in society as unhealthy physical symptoms such as nervousness and being overly sensitive, and the genre began declining sharply in popularity. [1]
The novelist Henry Fielding, known later for his novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), satirized the sentimental style in his early novels Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742).
Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811) is most often seen as a "witty satire of the sentimental novel", [9] [ full citation needed ] by juxtaposing values of the Age of Enlightenment (sense, reason) with those of the later eighteenth century (sensibility, feeling) while exploring the larger realities of women's lives, especially through concerns with marriage and inheritance. This reading of Sense and Sensibility specifically and Austen's fiction in general has been complicated and revised by recent critics such as Claudia L. Johnson (Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (1988) and Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (1995)), Jillian Heydt-Stevenson (Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions (2005)), and Christopher C. Nagle (Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era (2007)), all of whom see unruly and even subversive energies at play in her work, inspired by the sentimental tradition.
James Joyce parodies the sentimental novel in the "Nausicaa" episode of Ulysses (1918–1920). The character of Gerty MacDowell was inspired by the protagonist of The Lamplighter (1854), a nineteenth century best-seller.
The sentimental novel complemented social trends of the time toward humanism and the heightened value of human life. The literature focused on weaker members of society, such as orphans and condemned criminals, and allowed readers to identify and sympathize with them. This translated to growing sentimentalism within society, and led to social movements calling for change, such as the abolition of the death penalty and of slavery. Instead of the death penalty, popular sentiment called for the rehabilitation of criminals, rather than harsh punishment. [10] Frederick Douglass himself was inspired to stand against his own bondage and slavery in general in his famous Narrative by the speech by the sentimentalist playwright Sheridan in The Columbian Orator detailing a fictional dialogue between a master and slave. [8]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther was highly sentimental and immediately extremely popular throughout Europe, and even inspired young people who could relate to Werther's sorrows to commit suicide. [11] It is also an excellent example of an epistolary novel, an especially typical form for eighteenth-century novels of sensibility, beginning with the influential novels of Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1748), and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). The latter was an especially important influence on Jane Austen, who refers to it repeatedly in her letters and began a dramatic adaptation of the work for the amusement of her family.
The Gothic novel's story occurs in a distant time and place, often Medieval or Renaissance Europe (especially Italy and Spain), and involved the fantastic exploits of a virtuous heroine imperiled by dark, tyrannical forces beyond her control. The first Gothic novel is Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), but its most famous and popular practitioner was Ann Radcliffe, whose early Gothic novels in the 1790s maintain the fashion. [12]
Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, following Edmund Burke, held that the sublime and the beautiful were juxtaposed. The sublime was awful (awe-inspiring) and terrifying while the beautiful was calm and reassuring. The characters and landscapes of the Gothic rest almost entirely within the sublime, with the heroine serving as the great exception. The “beautiful” heroine's susceptibility to supernatural elements, integral to these novels, both celebrates and problematizes what came to be seen as hyper-sensibility.
Gothic and sentimental novels are considered a form of popular fiction, reaching their height of popularity in the late 18th century. They reflected a popular shift from Neoclassical ideas of order and reason to emotion and imagination. [13] Popular stylistic elements, such as the "discovery" of the original manuscript by the author (as in Walpole's The Castle of Otranto ) or creating fragmented works by combining disjointed tales (seen in Sterne's A Sentimental Journey ) were meant to suggest to the reader that there was no act of artistic creation to distort reality between the reader and the work, or that the emotional intensity and sincerity remained intact. [14]
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works are an implicit critique of the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her deft use of social commentary, realism and biting irony have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.
Sense and Sensibility is the first novel by the English author Jane Austen, published in 1811. It was published anonymously; By A Lady appears on the title page where the author's name might have been. It tells the story of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne as they come of age. They have an older half-brother, John, and a younger sister, Margaret.
Northanger Abbey is a coming-of-age novel and a satire of Gothic novels written by the English author Jane Austen. Although the title page is dated 1818 and it was published posthumously in 1817 with Persuasion, Northanger Abbey was completed in 1803, making it the first of Austen's novels to be completed in full. The story concerns Catherine Morland, the naïve young protagonist, and her journey to a better understanding of herself and of the world around her after Catherine's fondness for Gothic novels and her active imagination distort her view of the world.
Frances Brooke was an English novelist, essayist, playwright and translator. Hers was the first English novel known to have been written in Canada.
The English novel is an important part of English literature. This article mainly concerns novels, written in English, by novelists who were born or have spent a significant part of their lives in England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. However, given the nature of the subject, this guideline has been applied with common sense, and reference is made to novels in other languages or novelists who are not primarily British, where appropriate.
Charlotte Smith was an English novelist and poet of the School of Sensibility whose Elegiac Sonnets (1784) contributed to the revival of the form in England. She also helped to set conventions for Gothic fiction and wrote political novels of sensibility. Despite ten novels, four children's books and other works, she saw herself mainly as a poet and expected to be remembered for that.
Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but in current usage the term commonly connotes a reliance on shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason.
Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means through which knowledge is gathered. It also became associated with sentimental moral philosophy.
Mary: A Fiction is the only complete novel by 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a woman's successive "romantic friendships" with a woman and a man. Composed while Wollstonecraft was a governess in Ireland, the novel was published in 1788 shortly after her summary dismissal and her decision to embark on a writing career, a precarious and disreputable profession for women in 18th-century Britain.
As a literary mode, sentimentalism, the practice of being sentimental, and thus tending towards making emotions and feelings the basis of a person's actions and reactions, as opposed to reason, has been a recurring aspect of world literature. Sentimentalism includes a variety of aspects in literature, such as sentimental poetry, the sentimental novel, and the German sentimentalist music movement, Empfindsamkeit. European literary sentimentalism arose during the Age of Enlightenment, partly as a response to sentimentalism in philosophy. In eighteenth-century England, the sentimental novel was a major literary genre. The genre developed in England between 1730 and 1780 at the time of high enlightenment from where it spread to other European literatures. Its philosophical basis primarily came from Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, a pupil of John Locke.
Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously in 1798 by her husband, William Godwin, and is often considered her most radical feminist work.
The novel of manners is a work of fiction that re-creates a social world, conveying with detailed observation the complex of customs, values, and mores of a stratified society. The behavioural conventions (manners) of the society dominate the plot of the story, and characters are differentiated by the degree to which they meet or fail to meet the uniform standard of ideal social behaviour, as established by society.
The reception history of Jane Austen follows a path from modest fame to wild popularity. Jane Austen (1775–1817), the author of such works as Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815), has become one of the best-known and most widely read novelists in the English language. Her novels are the subject of intense scholarly study and the centre of a diverse fan culture.
Domestic realism normally refers to the genre of 19th-century fictional works about the daily lives of ordinary Victorian women. This body of writing is also known as "sentimental fiction" or "woman's fiction". The genre is mainly reflected in the novel though short-stories and non-fiction works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Our Country Neighbors" and The New Housekeeper's Manual written by Stowe and her sister-in-law Catharine Beecher are works of domestic realism.
Celestina is an eighteenth-century English novel and poet Charlotte Smith’s third novel. Published in 1791 by Thomas Cadell, the novel tells the story of an adopted orphan who discovers the secret of her parentage and marries the man she loves. It is a courtship novel that follows the typical Cinderella plot while still commenting on contemporary political issues.
Jane Austen's (1775–1817) distinctive literary style relies on a combination of parody, burlesque, irony, free indirect speech and a degree of realism. She uses parody and burlesque for comic effect and to critique the portrayal of women in 18th-century sentimental and Gothic novels. Austen extends her critique by highlighting social hypocrisy through irony; she often creates an ironic tone through free indirect speech in which the thoughts and words of the characters mix with the voice of the narrator. The degree to which critics believe Austen's characters have psychological depth informs their views regarding her realism. While some scholars argue that Austen falls into a tradition of realism because of her finely executed portrayal of individual characters and her emphasis on "the everyday", others contend that her characters lack a depth of feeling compared with earlier works, and that this, combined with Austen's polemical tone, places her outside the realist tradition.
Sentimental comedy is an 18th-century dramatic genre which sprang up as a reaction to the immoral tone of English Restoration plays. In sentimental comedies, middle-class protagonists triumphantly overcome a series of moral trials. These plays aimed to produce tears rather than laughter and reflected contemporary philosophical conceptions of humans as inherently good but capable of being led astray by bad example. By appealing to his noble sentiments, a man could be reformed and set back on the path of virtue. Although the plays contained characters whose natures seemed overly virtuous and whose problems were too easily resolved, they were accepted by audiences as truthful representations of the human predicament.
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Scholars regard the publishing of William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 as probably the beginning of the movement in England, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end. Romanticism arrived in other parts of the English-speaking world later; in the United States, about 1820.
The type of romance considered here is mainly the genre of novel defined by the novelist Walter Scott as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", in contrast to mainstream novels which realistically depict the state of a society. These works frequently, but not exclusively, take the form of the historical novel. Scott's novels are also frequently described as historical romances, and Northrop Frye suggested "the general principle that most 'historical novels' are romances". Scott describes romance as a "kindred term", and many European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo".
