ALEX WETMORE. Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction.

Abstract

The ‘sentimental turn’ (p. 12) around the mid-eighteenth century, Alex Wetmore notes, gave new opportunities for philosophy and fiction to intertwine in the discourse of sensibility. As he acknowledges, Wetmore joins long-familiar and more recent critics in his exploration of sentimentalism, sociability and self-reflexivity, but he also draws on up-to-date work on eighteenth-century print culture (by Christina Lupton, Deirdre Lynch and Christopher Flint) to address how the materiality of the self-conscious ‘man of feeling’ is presented in all senses of the term. Wetmore introduces the phrase ‘corporeal defamiliarization’ to describe ‘how novels about men of feeling exhibit a distinct type of self-consciousness … concerned with denaturalizing their own status as tactile, tangible books’ (p. 2). Authors of sentimental novels link the text’s materiality with that of its creator or its characters by repeatedly reminding readers of the material object they hold in their hands using unusual typography, fragmented ‘manuscript’ sources, narratorial intrusion and non-linear plotting.