Man Of Feeling Research Articles

“Not a Single Syllogism From Beginning to End”: on Fragmentariness and the Critique of the Novel in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling

“Not a Single Syllogism from Beginning to End”: On Fragmentariness and the Critique of the Novel in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling. Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is known to be particularly striking for its high level of formal and nar

“My Soul’s Far Better Part”: Homer’s Hector as Man of Feeling

“My Soul’s Far Better Part”: Homer’s Hector as Man of Feeling. Eighteenth-century sentimentalism may seem foreign to the brutal world of Homer’s Iliad. Yet the parting of Hector and Andromache as depicted in the ancient Greek epic was a key symbol of sens

Sentiment and Exploitation in British Literary Representations of Eighteenth-Century India

This article argues that Henry Mackenzie’s novel, The Man of Feeling (1771), represents an important shift in British literary depictions of the indigenous peoples of India. Although the inhabitants of the West Indies had been represented condescendingly in British literature for centuries prior to the publication of Mackenzie’s novel, East Indian characters, such as John Dryden’s version of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, were seen as powerful and civilized. By 1771, however, East and West “Indian” characters had become virtually indistinguishable from one another in British literature.

Fierce Loves and Faithless Wars: Bruce, Byron and the Man of Feeling

Lord Byron’s epic poems, and more pointedly his parliamentary record as exhibited by his speeches, express a rare communion with the plight of the working man and a singular opposition to unjust war. These sentiments, hilariously and cuttingly explored in Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, set him apart from the archetypal, systemically controlled male of his time. His work shares intriguing connections with the songs and expostulations of Bruce Springsteen, whose musical efforts against the Vietnam war, including Born in the USA and Your Hometown, are marked by outright tragedy and winking irony as well as the kind of subversive rhetorical melodies found in Byron’s work.
 Additionally, Springsteen’s vast library of songs espousing the real, abstract and enduring challenges of working-class Americans (particularly men) parallels Byron’s open parliamentary support for the society of Luddites. Drawing from Ildiko Csengei’s essay The Fever of Vain Longing, which posits that Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage sees the transformation of the Byronic Hero into The Man of Feeling, I argue that while the unstirred Byronic Hero often stands in opulent contrast to the socially isolated, margin dwelling male trope that peppers Springsteen’s songs, this transformation aligns the two poets’ transgressive archetypes.

Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out

Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out

The Age of Johnson, ed. Jack Lynch and J. T. Scanlan

<i>The Age of Johnson</i>, ed. Jack Lynch and J. T. Scanlan

Hernandez, Alex Eric. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering.

Hernandez, Alex Eric. <i>The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering</i>.

The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Albert J. Rivero.

<i>The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century</i>. Ed. Albert J. Rivero.

Reason and Its Others in Coetzee's Jesus Novels

Reason and Its Others in Coetzee's Jesus Novels

Collected in 2020—Recent Essay and Story Collections of Note

Collected in 2020—Recent Essay and Story Collections of Note Sam Pickering (bio) Scott Russell Sanders, The Way of Imagination: Essays. Counterpoint, 2020, 259 pp., $16.95 (paperback). Megan Harlan, Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays. The University of Georgia Press, 2020, 171 pp., $22.95 (paperback). Gilbert Allen, The Beasts of Belladonna. Slant Books, 2020, 156 pp., $34 (hardcover), $19 (paperback). Jay Parini, Borges and Me: An Encounter. Doubleday, 2020, 299 pp., $27.95 (hardcover). Scott Russell Sanders, The Way of Imagination: Essays Counterpoint, 2020, 259 pp., $16.95 (paperback) Scott Russell Sanders knows how to frame houses and paragraphs. Since the early 1980s, he has raised a library of novels, children’s books, and essays. The Way of Imagination is a collection of sixteen wondrous and wondering essays. The subjects range from the misuse of words to the importance of beauty. Sanders has long advocated living by the Golden Rule, urging people to care for and love others and to treasure and protect place, the home of future others. He is a literate latitudinarian, eschewing doctrine and embracing the spirit of Christianity—that is, the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. In the eighteenth century, in her Progress of Romance, Clara Reeve praised the moral effects of literature, writing about novels of sensibility, “Such books cannot be too strongly recommended, as under the disguise of fiction, warm the heart with the love of virtue, and by that means, excite the reader to the practice of it.” In a conversation with Jay Parini described in Borges and Me, Jorge Luis Borges remarked, “Novels and works of nonfiction rub spines, even mirror each other. Anything that passes through memory becomes [End Page 177] fiction, you see. Fictio—in Latin it means to shape.” In his nonfiction, Sanders writes as a man of feeling, warming the heart and shaping appreciation. He also stirs anger. Only money-worshippers spreading the sorcery of consumerism would shave the tops off five hundred mountains in Appalachia, blasting the countryside and turning streams and rivers into Acherons. In 1801, Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed, “In natural objects we feel ourselves, or think of ourselves, only by likenesses, among men, too often by differences. Hence the soothing love-kindling effect of rural nature—the bad passions of human societies.” While musing about the deleterious effects of climate change, collective thinking, and golden manacles, Sanders becomes a modern Coleridge. He walks through a forest and, marveling at trout lilies, spring beauties, and toothwort, disappears “into the looking.” “My inner chatter ceased,” he writes. “For a spell there was only a communion of delicate blooms, fragrant soil, birdsong, sunlight, wind, breath, all suffused with an energy that might be joy, might be growth, might be the pulse of life.” “As we degenerate,” Emerson lamented, “the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us.” Sanders writes as a student of Emerson and Thoreau and cites Thoreau’s inspiriting second chapter of Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.” For years reading Thoreau rejuvenated me. But I have aged, and although I’ve long celebrated the gift of life, I cannot explain what I lived for. Nowadays the world is too much with me. In hopes of luring development and in the process promoting the chain-saw ethic of sawing down and smothering with asphalt, my town, Mansfield, Connecticut, recently adopted “Your Place to Grow” as its slogan. “A Place for Cancers to Grow,” my friend Josh said, emending the slogan. The cancers to which Josh alluded were physical and mental, these last the material things that cause people to become addicted to acquiring. [End Page 178] In inspirational contrast to me, Sanders embodies the invigorating will to hope. For him, imagination can be a panacea enabling humanity to escape pathless ways. He draws upon the eighteenth-century Quaker John Woolman, who believed that within every person was an “inner light.” To Woolman, the light represented the presence of god, that is, decency and goodness, guiding one through...

Shame and Futile Masculinity: Feeling Backwards in Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling

Eighteenth-century masculinity, despite some important interventions in recent decades, remains an underdeveloped area in literary studies of the period. This essay seeks to redress the balance by reconsidering a now canonical text, the popular sentimental novel The Man of Feeling (1771), in light of the insights that theories of queerness and affect, particularly shame, have to offer to historical studies of masculinity. My argument takes as its starting point the contention that all normative social structures must incorporate, rather than entirely expel, the non-normative in order to function. Engaging with theorists including Lee Edelman and Heather Love, I argue that Harley, the hero of Henry Mackenzie’s novel, should be understood as an embodiment of weak sexualization, a figure who refuses the positive progress of capital accumulation for wilful oblivion. In doing so, the essay provides new ways of thinking through eighteenth-century ideas of masculinity that demonstrate that the queer, the backward, and the weak are integrated within normative con temporary discourses of the masculine, rather than excluded from them.

Puppets, Waxworks, and a Wooden Dramatis Personae: Eighteenth-Century Material Culture and Philosophical History in William Godwin’s Fleetwood

William Godwin’s novel Fleetwood, or The New Man of Feeling (1805) is a phil osophical history, crafted through distinctively eighteenth-century material objects. Two extraordinary episodes underpin this history of one individual’s mind and of the times that shaped it, and demonstrate how material objects con tribute to the personal and political nature of narratives of the self. First, a human-sized puppet is used in a fatal prank among Oxford undergradu ates; second, Fleetwood deliriously destroys a waxwork image of his wife. Where Godwin’s contemporaries found these scenes too outré for a novel that claimed veri similitude, I argue that their materi alism is crucial to Fleetwood’s examina tion of eighteenth-century insti tu tions. Because examin ing material culture was a typical eighteenth-century historiographical strategy, Godwin is able to write as though in the era that he describes and with the wisdom of hindsight from 1805. Fore ground ing the material objects of puppet and wax work illuminates the satirical, educational, medical, sexual, and theatrical dis courses that imbue Fleetwood’s material artifacts and that shape the novel’s setting.

Deathly Sentimentalism: Sarah Fielding, Henry Mackenzie

Regarding the eighteenth-century sentimental novel, critics have long argued that sentiment works to bond subjects and to accommodate subjects to society. The sentimental novel also teaches the reader how to die. Looking to Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744, 1753) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), I argue that the eighteenth-century sentimental novel deploys death as a figure for thinking about political critique and its limits. On their deathbeds, characters utter politically charged speeches, but cannot act upon their words, such that sentimental critique is both powerful and inoperative. Along the contours of a deathly sentimentalism there are slippages between resistance and passivity, between isolation and socialization. The sentimental novel bespeaks, in its emphasis upon mortality and its vexations, the difficulty of accommodating political expression in rhythm with the momentum of modern history.

“I Never Saw Such Children”: Disability, Industrialism, and Children’s Advocacy in William Godwin’s Fleetwood

Drawing upon current studies of disability and Romanticism, this essay invites literary historians to consider the ways impairment intersects with poverty and age in the Romantic era, as well as the ways in which late eighteenth-century reform writers sought to prevent disability even as they helped constitute it as a category of difference. The essay uses William Godwin’s Fleetwood or the New Man of Feeling (1805) as a case study to explore the history of the factory reform act from a disability studies perspective. The Factory Reform Act of 1802 sought to protect child laborers from environmental and occupational impairment, though it ultimately failed to do so effectively. I argue that William Godwin’s Fleetwood (1805) criticized the Factory Act of 1802 by demonstrating the inability of its educational provision to protect children from neurological impairments resulting from factory labor.

Holly Furneaux. Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War.

Holly Furneaux. Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War.

Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War

Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War

Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War

Holly Furneaux, <i>Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War</i>

Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War

Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War

Sensibility, Luxury, and the Economy of Sympathetic Pleasure: Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling

Sensibility, Luxury, and the Economy of Sympathetic Pleasure: Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling

2015 George Richardson Lecture

Anthony Benezet (1713–84) is familiar to historians of slavery, abolition and Quakerism for his important role in disseminating Pennsylvanian Quaker antislavery to a wider and ecumenical audience. This article argues that an important reason for this success was Benezet’s considered deployment of a fashionable sentimental rhetoric, or rhetoric of sensibility, that allowed him to reach out to wide audiences and to engage them both through their reason and through their emotions. This strategy enhanced Benezet’s ability to encourage the Quaker discourse of antislavery, as it had developed over a century, to inform Atlantic discourses more widely. To support this argument, the article demonstrates that, in his time and for some time afterwards, Benezet was regarded by many as a man of feeling in terms familiar from contemporary sentimental literature. It concludes by closely reading a selection of passages from his antislavery writing to show that, while Benezet’s rhetoric was by no means purely sentimental,...