Knowra Sentimentalism Sentimentalism Sentimentalism was an eighteenth-century literary movement that foregrounded emotion, sympathy, and private experience, often using readers’ responses to explore moral character.
Sympathy : The capacity to share or imaginatively enter another person’s feelings. Sentimentalist writing makes fellow-feeling a basis for moral response.
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded : Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel about a servant who resists her employer’s sexual advances. Its letters and threatened heroine invite readers to judge virtue through intimate feeling.
Samuel Richardson : An English novelist whose works include Pamela and Clarissa. His epistolary novels helped establish private feeling as a major literary subject.
Neoclassicism : An artistic and literary movement that drew on classical models, formal restraint, and ideals of order. Its emphasis on decorum and formal control contrasts with sentimentalism’s emotional intensity.
Sensibility : A heightened responsiveness to emotion, sensation, and the feelings of others. The movement prized finely tuned emotional responsiveness as a virtue.
Clarissa : Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel about a young woman’s resistance to family coercion and sexual violence. Its epistolary form intensifies sympathy while exposing the costs of patriarchal power.
Laurence Sterne : An English-Irish novelist and clergyman, best known for Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. His playful, digressive prose made sentimental response unstable and self-conscious.
Gothic fiction : Fiction that uses terror, mystery, and supernatural or seemingly supernatural events. Gothic writing heightens fear and dread where sentimental fiction often solicits pity.
Sentimental novel : A novel that emphasizes emotional scenes and readers’ sympathetic identification with characters. This popular form gave sentimental ideals an extended narrative shape.
The Man of Feeling : Henry Mackenzie’s 1771 novel about Harley, whose emotional responsiveness shapes his encounters with others. Harley embodies the sentimental ideal of compassion, alongside its vulnerability to ridicule.
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