Beyond Sense and Sensibility

Moral Formation and the Literary Imagination from Johnson to Wordsworth

Edited by Peggy Thompson - Contributions by Rhona Brown; Leslie A. Chilton; Timothy Erwin; Evan Gottlieb; Christopher D. Johnson; Heather King; James Noggle; Adam Rounce and Adrianne Wadewitz

During the last half of the eighteenth century, sensibility and its less celebrated corollary sense were subject to constant variation, critique, and contestation in ways that raise profound questions about the formation of moral identities and communities. Beyond Sense and Sensibility addresses those questions. What authority does reason retain as a moral faculty in an age of sensibility? How reliable or desirable is feeling as a moral guide or a test of character? How does such a focus contribute to moral isolation and elitism or, conversely, social connectedness and inclusion? How can we distinguish between that connectedness and a disciplinary socialization? How do insensible processes contribute to our moral formation and action? What alternatives lie beyond the anthropomorphism implied by sense and sensibility?

Drawing extensively on philosophical thought from the eighteenth century as well as conceptual frameworks developed in the twenty-first century, this volume of essays examines moral formation represented in or implicitly produced by a range of texts, including Boswell’s literary criticism, Fergusson’s poetry, Burney’s novels, Doddridge’s biography, Smollett’s novels, Charlotte Smith’s children’s books, Johnson’s essays, Gibbon’s history, and Wordsworth’s poetry. The distinctive conceptual and textual breadth of Beyond Sense and Sensibility yields a rich reassessment and augmentation of the two perspectives summarized by the terms sense and sensibility in later eighteenth-century Britain.

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 226 • Trim: 6½ x 9½

978-1-61148-640-7 • Hardback • December 2014 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

978-1-61148-642-1 • Paperback • October 2016 • $52.99 • (£41.00)

Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, History / Europe / Great Britain / General, Philosophy / Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Beyond Sense and Sensibility

Moral Formation and the Literary Imagination from Johnson to Wordsworth

Hardback

Paperback

Summary

During the last half of the eighteenth century, sensibility and its less celebrated corollary sense were subject to constant variation, critique, and contestation in ways that raise profound questions about the formation of moral identities and communities. Beyond Sense and Sensibility addresses those questions. What authority does reason retain as a moral faculty in an age of sensibility? How reliable or desirable is feeling as a moral guide or a test of character? How does such a focus contribute to moral isolation and elitism or, conversely, social connectedness and inclusion? How can we distinguish between that connectedness and a disciplinary socialization? How do insensible processes contribute to our moral formation and action? What alternatives lie beyond the anthropomorphism implied by sense and sensibility?

Drawing extensively on philosophical thought from the eighteenth century as well as conceptual frameworks developed in the twenty-first century, this volume of essays examines moral formation represented in or implicitly produced by a range of texts, including Boswell’s literary criticism, Fergusson’s poetry, Burney’s novels, Doddridge’s biography, Smollett’s novels, Charlotte Smith’s children’s books, Johnson’s essays, Gibbon’s history, and Wordsworth’s poetry. The distinctive conceptual and textual breadth of Beyond Sense and Sensibility yields a rich reassessment and augmentation of the two perspectives summarized by the terms sense and sensibility in later eighteenth-century Britain.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 226 • Trim: 6½ x 9½

978-1-61148-640-7 • Hardback • December 2014 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

978-1-61148-642-1 • Paperback • October 2016 • $52.99 • (£41.00)

Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, History / Europe / Great Britain / General, Philosophy / Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Author

Peggy Thompson is Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword: In Memoriam O M Brack, Jr. (1938-2012)
Timothy Erwin
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I Revisiting Sensibility
Chapter One: Boswell and the Limits of Sensibility
Adam Rounce
Chapter Two: “Beshrew the sombre pencil!”: Robert Fergusson and Sensibility in Scotland
Rhona Brown
Chapter Three: Pictures of Women in Frances Burney’s Cecilia and Camilla: How Cecilia Looks and What Camilla Sees
Heather King
Part II Rethinking Didacticism
Chapter Four: Artful Instruction: Philip Doddridge’s Life of Colonel James Gardiner
Christopher D. Johnson
Chapter Five: Two Singularly Moral Works: Fenelon’s The Adventure of Telemachus and Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
Leslie A. Chilton
Chapter Six: The Politically Engaged Child: Charlotte Smith’s Children’s Literature and the Discourse of Sensibility
Adrianne Wadewitz
Part III Reframing the Questions
Chapter Seven: Habit and Reason in Samuel Johnson’s Rambler
Peggy Thompson
Chapter Eight: Unfelt Affect
James Noggle
Chapter Nine: Seeing into the Life of Things: Re-Viewing Early Wordsworth through Object-Oriented Philosophy
Evan Gottlieb
Works Cited
Index
About the Contributors

Reviews

The nine essays published here are presented as a Festschrift for the great bibliographer and Smollett scholar O. M. Brack . . . The essays themselves range widely in subject: Adam Rounce explores James Boswell’s distancing of himself from the less sentimental Dr. Johnson, who (as Mrs. Thrase said) always 'hated a feeler'; Heather King traces Frances Burney’s persistent argument that the same 'sensibility' that makes female suffering morally educative to men takes a terrible toll on women themselves. Perhaps the best essays in the collection come in the last section, 'Reframing the Question': the editor’s own discussion of Johnson’s fear of nonrational 'habit' and James Noggle on the curious fondness during the 'age of sensibility' for the word insensibly (most of all in Gibbon) . . . Every essay in it [the collection] is clear, thoughtful, interesting, and informative. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.
— Choice Reviews