Sentimental novel

A form of fiction that uses emotional experience and domestic relationships to explore moral questions. It often presents sympathy and compassion as guides to ethical judgment.

Sensibility: A capacity for refined emotional responsiveness, especially to suffering and virtue. The novel’s moral force depends on characters’ and readers’ responsiveness to feeling.
Samuel Richardson: An English novelist whose works include Pamela and Clarissa. His novels established influential models of virtue, emotional trial, and domestic danger.
The Vicar of Wakefield: A 1766 novel by Oliver Goldsmith about the trials of a clergyman and his family. Its domestic misfortunes test family affection and moral steadiness.
Anti-sentimentalism: A critique of treating emotional responsiveness as reliable evidence of moral goodness. It challenges the form’s premise that visible feeling signals ethical character.
Sympathy: The capacity to share or imaginatively understand another person’s feelings. Characters’ appeals to sympathy make private suffering a test of moral conduct.
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded: A 1740 novel by Samuel Richardson about a servant resisting her employer’s sexual advances. Its heroine’s letters and moral trials helped define the English sentimental novel.
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy: A 1768 travel novel by Laurence Sterne centered on the narrator’s emotional encounters. It shows sentimental response in brief encounters beyond the family home.
The School for Scandal: A 1777 comedy by Richard Brinsley Sheridan about gossip, deception, and reputation. Its exposure of performative virtue contrasts with sentimental faith in moral feeling.
Domestic fiction: Fiction centered on household relationships, private life, and domestic experience. Its focus on family and intimacy supplies the novel’s characteristic moral setting.
Clarissa: A 1748 novel by Samuel Richardson about a young woman coerced by the rake Robert Lovelace. Its prolonged account of suffering and virtue became a landmark of sentimental fiction.

Linked from 12 pages