Abstract
Abstract This chapter considers the parallel development of bourgeois tragedy, genre serieux (the serious genre), and the era’s early sentimental literature. It reads Sarah Fielding’s pathbreaking sentimental novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), and Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751) in light of the siblings’ close connection to the first generation of bourgeois tragedians in order to claim that sentimental fiction refigures tragedy’s aesthetic frames, with both adopting the tableau in order to invest simple, pathetic scenes of ordinary suffering with dignity. The chapter then considers how these formal elements navigate between realism, sentimentality, and ironic detachment by looking briefly at scenes from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and Sophia Lee’s adaptation of Diderot’s Le Pere de famille (1758) as A Chapter of Accidents (1782). Finally, it considers this cultural and affective work in light of recent theories of “public intimacy.”
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