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.
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
