Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics : Essays in Honor of Jean H. Hagstrum

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Syndy M. Conger
Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1990 - 235 pages
Focusing on the period from about 1690 to 1890, these essays depict an age of sensibility that was in transformation. New connections are revealed between sensibility and other key preoccupations of the age, including the feminine ideal and the poetic imagination.

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Contents

Contributors
3
Introduction
7
Sensibility and the Art of Conversation Considered
19
Laurence Sternes Journal of the Pulse of Sensibility
37
Sensibility as Argument
57
Madness and Lust in the Age of Sensibility
79
What Kind of Heroine Is Mary Wollstonecraft?
97
Sensibility and the Walk of Reason Mary Wollstonecrafts Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique
114
Finance and Romance
141
The Poetics of Schiller and Wordsworth
166
De Quinceys System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosses Telescopes as an Inquiry into the Sublime
189
A Select Bibliography of Secondary Sources
202
A Chronological List of Works
220
Index
225
Copyright

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Page 189 - For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind; and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence...
Page 184 - Humble and rustic life was generally chosen because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language...
Page 158 - Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least twenty years of their lives.
Page 189 - ... he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged ; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day.
Page 155 - The whole of Lucy's behaviour in the affair, and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time and conscience.
Page 181 - ... the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, ie in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, ie in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection 'all by himself.
Page 48 - I can answer for those two. It is a subject which works well, and suits the frame of mind I have been in for some time past — I told you my design in it was to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do — so it runs most upon those gentler passions and affections, which aid so much to it.
Page 189 - I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble endeavour made in these volumes to counteract it; and, reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it, which are equally inherent and indestructible...
Page 65 - As to the tragic paintings by which Mr. Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect.
Page 185 - For the Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion : it is the history or science of feelings. Now every man must know that an attempt is rarely made to communicate impassioned feelings without something of an accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language.

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