Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Spectacular passions: eighteenth-century oratory and the reform of eloquence
- 2 Bodies on the borders of politeness: ‘Orator Henley’, Methodist enthusiasm, and polite literature
- 3 Thomas Sheridan: forging the British body
- 4 The art of acting: mid-century stagecraft and the broadcast of feeling
- 5 Polite reading: sentimental fiction and the performance of response
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Polite reading: sentimental fiction and the performance of response
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Spectacular passions: eighteenth-century oratory and the reform of eloquence
- 2 Bodies on the borders of politeness: ‘Orator Henley’, Methodist enthusiasm, and polite literature
- 3 Thomas Sheridan: forging the British body
- 4 The art of acting: mid-century stagecraft and the broadcast of feeling
- 5 Polite reading: sentimental fiction and the performance of response
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I remember so well its [The Man of Feeling's] first publication, my mother and sisters crying over it, dwelling upon it with rapture! And when I read it, as I was a girl of fourteen not yet versed in sentiment, I had a secret dread I should not cry enough to gain the credit of proper sensibility.
Lady Louisa Stuart (1826)READING AS PERFORMANCE
In what ways were sentimental novels implicated within elocutionary discourse? Why is a popular form of narrative fiction – a genre which dominated British prose fiction for the four decades or so after 1740 – worthy of attention in a study of the textual functions served by the body in eighteenth-century polite culture? A short answer to these questions might run along these lines: in the didactic, morally concerned novels of Richardson and his literary followers can be witnessed the construction of a sentimental somatic eloquence which is analogous to the ‘body projects’ of elocutionists; such novels were not only sites for the literary staging of sentimental somatic eloquence but sought actively to produce such eloquence among the reading public; it is apparent, furthermore, that there grew up around sentimental novels a culture in which bodily responses were widely lauded as signs of moral status. The reading of sentimental fiction, then, became an important mechanism by which polite expression could be exercised.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture , pp. 142 - 181Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004