'I will not weep': Reading through the Tears of Henry Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling"

Abstract

This article investigates tears of sympathy as part of a sentimental reading practice in the eighteenth century, and describes how Henry Mackenzie's novel "The Man of Feeling" self-consciously enacts the reader's education via sympathetic emotional response. Mackenzie's novel is interpreted in the context of the literature and moral-sense philosophy of eighteenth-century sensibility and sentimentalism. The 'man of feeling' consists in an always shifting perspective; it is an emotional lens, a technique of reading, rather than a clearly defined character type. The article also addresses the question of interpersonal relations and intersubjectivity as a common concern for sensibility and psychoanalysis.