Abstract
This chapter re-reads the rise of the novel by discerning resonances of contemporary affect theory within eighteenth-century discourses of sensibility. Such resonances, the chapter argues, indicate a need to renegotiate the early novel’s relationship to both empiricist epistemology and the formal realism that is supposed to be its aesthetic doppelganger. Close readings of Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Austen’s Emma (1813) exemplify early attempts to articulate the virtuality of emotional experience in the present tense and provide a critical lens for interpreting key features of the novel’s aesthetic: epistolary narration and free indirect discourse. In this way affect functions not only as the thematic focus of sentimental fiction but also as a theoretical problematic that catalyzed formal developments of the novel genre.
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Notes
- 1.
See Stephen Ahern, Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680–1810 (New York: AMS Press, 2007), and “Nothing More Than Feelings? Affect Theory Reads the Age of Sensibility,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 58, no. 3, 2017, 281–94; Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
- 2.
For an exemplary overview of Watt’s scholarly influence, see Nicholas Seager’s The Rise of the Novel: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Roger Maoli’s recent study Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel further emphasizes the influence that Watt’s work has continued to have on eighteenth-century studies.
- 3.
I use geography here in a sense that is as broad as the disciplinary practice that bears its name, so as to include not only physical features of landscape and infrastructure but also characteristics of culture, economics, and politics.
- 4.
This is one of the primary investigations of Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953), which challenges Humean epistemology on the grounds of its inability to explain how the mind, as a collection of ideas, becomes a system and, thus, a subject.
- 5.
Alan McKenzie, for instance, claims that “the passions that figure so prominently in the prose of the eighteenth century had been refined by several thousand years of analysis and illustration at the hands of philosophers, theologians, and artists” (1990, 24).
- 6.
See Sill’s first chapter, “The Physician of the Mind from Zeno to Arbuthnot,” for an outline of the historical trajectory of Stoic thought that serves as the basis for his reading of the English novel as a modern implementation of Galenic therapy of desire (13–34). Thomas Dixon offers a parallel in reference to a Stoic “cognitive therapy” (2012, 341), while Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse similarly call attention to the eighteenth-century novel’s project of “affective normativity” (2006, 144–47).
- 7.
James Noggle has recently explored the implications of “insensibility” as an eighteenth-century term that “allows [prose writers] to link expressions of feeling with the unfelt processes from which they emerge and gesture to their grounding beyond emotional consciousness” (2015, 128).
- 8.
This well-known phrase originates in the preface to Sir Charles Grandison (1753), in which the text’s ostensible editor comments on the voluminous “nature of familiar letters, written, as it were to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided.”
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Sodano, J.P. (2019). Semblances of Affect in the Early English Novel: Narrating Intensity. In: Ahern, S. (eds) Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8_4
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