Abstract
Nineteenth-century philosophers, including J.S. Mill, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, criticized Jeremy Bentham for his supposed aesthetic insensibility to the arts, especially literature. Through analysis of Bentham’s manuscript comments on novelists, both negative (Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and C.M. Wieland) and positive (Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and William Beckford), this essay analyzes the pleasure Bentham took in fictional narratives in the context of his advocacy for sexual and gender minorities, disabled persons, colonized and enslaved persons, children, and animals. Drawing from a wide range of Bentham’s papers, the author then focuses on a vivid manuscript proposing ‘a new and improved Drama,’ in which Bentham examines the desire to be immersed in an interactive dramatic experience of one’s favorite works of fiction.
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