Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century

by John Mullan

This study examines the autobiographical writing of Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and David Hume, who chronicled the peculiarly intimate relationships between the texts they produced and the social lives they lived. Each relied on a language of feeling to represent social bonds they considered necessary, discovering, through their writing, a sociability dependent on the communication of passions and sentiments. This discovery, Mullan argues, played a critical role in the development of the eighteenth-century fiction now called sentimental.

Genres: History

Paperback

First published August 4, 1988

About the author

John Mullan is a Professor of English at University College London. He was General Editor of the Pickering & Chatto series Lives of the Great Romantics by Their Contemporaries, and Associate Editor for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A regular radio broadcaster and literary journalist, he writes on contemporary fiction for the Guardian and was a judge for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. John is a specialist in eighteenth-century literature.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[gracie rogers · Rating 2 out of 5]

i'm a yapper but john mullan has out-yapped us all

prose as dense as judith butler's, with far fewer interesting things to say

shame because his other austen scholarship is cracking