Tender Consciousness studies how Sterne's eighteenth-century model of British sentimentality is manifest in modernist Künstlerroman. Yeats's memoir, as well as Joyce's and Proust's novels, trace innate artistic growth. To show how aesthetic sensibility develops, the authors focus on the search for artistic identity through language and sensory perception, which release memory and spurs imagination, mediated by intellect. They present a childhood vision of the world by recalling character-revealing gestures and by depicting how precocious sensitivity to language signals the budding sentimental sensibility of these writers.

Autorentext

The Author: Laura Jane Ress holds a B.A. in English literature from University College of New York University. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Currently she teaches at Boston University and at Yale University Learning Center.