What makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of the benevolent, compassionate ideology of eighteenth-century sensibility? This book explores forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swoons and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century literary, philosophical and scientific texts.

Autorentext
ILDIKO CSENGEI is aLeverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK and Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Newnham College, Cambridge, UK. Previously she taught at the University of Southampton, UK, and held an R.A. Butler Research Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Her articles on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature appeared in Modern Language Review, Romantic Circles Praxis Series and Studies in Romanticism.

Inhalt
Acknowledgments Introduction: Sensibility from the Margins PART I: PHILOSOPHIES AND PHYSIOLOGIES OF FEELING Philosophies of Sympathy The Feeling Machine PART II: THE LITERATURE OF SENSIBILITY 'I Will Not Weep': Tears of Sympathy in Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling Women and the Negative: The Sentimental Swoon in Eighteenth-Century Fiction Godwin's Case: Melancholy Mourning in the 'Empire of Feeling' Bibliography Index