Abstract
For all its appeal to the feelings, sentimentalism also aimed at teaching wisdom. But wisdom, then as now, is a slippery thing. If the lessons one derives from the sentimental novel cannot be pointed out to others – if they find expression in neither words nor deeds – then skeptics have a good reason to remain skeptical. Critics of sentimentalism, including radicals like Mary Wollstonecraft and reformers like Hannah More and William Wilberforce, accused the mode of turning readers away from the world; even a sympathetic critic like Anna Letitia Barbauld found that reading sentimental novels had only the undesirable effects of real-life interactions: “Young people, by a course of this kind of reading, often acquire something of that apathy and indifference which the experience of real life would have given them, without its advantages.”
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Notes
- 1.
Anna Letitia Barbauld, “An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations,” in Selected Poetry & Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Craft (Ontario, CA: Broadview, 2002), 206.
- 2.
Barbauld, “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing,” in Selected Poetry & Prose, 407.
- 3.
Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002 [1987]), 125.
- 4.
Frances Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, ed. Margaret Drabble (London: Pandora, 1988), xx.
- 5.
Eugenius: or, Anecdotes of the Golden Vale: An Embellished Narrative of Real Facts (London: J. Dodsley, 1785), ii–iv.
- 6.
M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 22.
- 7.
De Quincey, North British Review, IX (1848), 193–194. Quoted in Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England: 1850–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 4.
- 8.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton (London: Chapman and Hall, 1856), 3.
- 9.
John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties,” in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 344–345.
- 10.
See John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel. The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830 (New York: King’s Crown, 1943), 87–100; and Stang, Theory of the Novel, 64–88.
- 11.
Review of A Letter to the Author of Waverley, in The Monthly Review, Vol. 93 (London: J. Porter, 1820), 171.
- 12.
Review of Women as They Are; of, the Manners of the Day, in The Edinburgh Review, Vol. 51 (Edinburgh: Longman, 1830), 444.
- 13.
Quoted in Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England, 69.
- 14.
Review of “Religious Novels,” in The North British Review, American Edition, Vol. XXI (XX on the cover) (New York: Leonard Scott & Co., 1856), 114, 115.
- 15.
According to Mill, “The truth of poetry is to paint the human soul truly; the truth of fiction is to give a true picture of life.” “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 346.
- 16.
“Religious Novels in Germany.” Originally published in The Saturday Review, and collected in E. Littell’s Living Age (Boston: Littell, Son and Company, 1857), Second Series, Volume XIX, 736.
- 17.
“Light Literature in France,” in The Saturday Review, Vol. IV (London: The Office, 1857), 220.
- 18.
“Of Novels, Historical and Didactic,” in Bentley’s Miscellany, Vol. 46 (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), 42–51 and 135–147.
- 19.
The relevant essays by De Quincey are “Letters to a Young Man whose Education Has Been Neglected” (1823), “Milton versus Southey and Landor” (1847), and “The Poetry of Pope” (1848). Monkshood’s figure of the berry is a direct quotation from the second of these essays.
- 20.
Walter Besant and Henry James, The Art of Fiction (Boston: The Algonquin Press, 1884), 4.
- 21.
The Art of Fiction, 66.
- 22.
Michael McKeon, “Prose Fiction: Great Britain,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. IV: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 263.
- 23.
Review of “Religious Novels,” in The North British Review, American Edition, Vol. XXI (XX on the cover) (New York: Leonard Scott & Co., 1856), 114, 115.
- 24.
David Hume, Essays. Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Liberty Classics, 1985), 240.
- 25.
Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1994), 295, 331.
- 26.
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 190.
- 27.
See, in particular, the chapter entitled “Literature and Knowledge.” Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics. Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1958; 2nd edn., 1981), 400–453.
- 28.
Frank B. Farrell, “‘The Way Light at the Edge of a Beach in Autumn is Learned’; Literature as Learning,” in A Sense of the World. Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge, ed. John Gibson (New York: Routledge, 2007), 247.
- 29.
John Hospers, “Literature and Human Nature,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17, No. 1 (1958), 45–57, esp. 55.
- 30.
Graham D. Martin, “A New Look at Fictional Reference,” Philosophy, 57, No. 220 (1982), 223–236.
- 31.
Mitchell Green, “How and What We Can Learn from Fiction,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, ed. Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), esp. 356–361.
- 32.
Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1998), 298, n. 12.
- 33.
A thorough and admirably circumspect discussion of current lines of defense is Helen Small’s The Value of the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 34.
Judith Butler, “Ordinary, Incredulous,” in The Humanities and Public Life, ed. Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 27–28.
- 35.
Crystal Bartolovich, “Humanities of Scale: Marxism, Surface Reading—and Milton,” PMLA 122, No. 2 (2007), 116.
- 36.
Peter Brooks, “Introduction” to The Humanities and Public Life, 14.
- 37.
Elaine Scarry, “Poetry, Injury, and the Ethics of Reading,” in The Humanities and Public Life, 42.
- 38.
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 175.
- 39.
Isaiah Berlin, “The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities,” in Against the Current (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979 [2003), 104. See also Berlin’s “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in Against the Current, 1–32.
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Maioli, R. (2016). Conclusion. In: Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39859-4_7
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