Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

by Lynn Festa

Overview

In this ambitious and original study, Lynn Festa examines how and why sentimental fiction became one of the primary ways of representing British and French relations with colonial populations in the eighteenth century. Drawing from novels, poetry, travel narratives, commerce manuals, and philosophical writings, Festa shows how sentimentality shaped communal and personal assertions of identity in an age of empire.

Read in isolation, sentimental texts can be made to tell a simple story about the emergence of the modern psychological self. Placed in conversation with empire, however, sentimentality invites both psychological and cultural readings of the encounter between self and other. Sentimental texts, Festa claims, enabled readers to create powerful imagined relations to distant people. Yet these emotional bonds simultaneously threatened the boundaries between self and other, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized. Festa argues that sentimental tropes and figures allowed readers to feel for others, while maintaining the particularity of the individual self. Sentimental identification thus operated as a form of differentiation as well as consolidation.

Festa contends that global reach increasingly outstripped imaginative grasp during this era. Sentimentality became an important tool for writers on empire, allowing conquest to be portrayed as commerce and scenes of violence and exploitation to be converted into displays of benevolence and pity. Above all, sentimental texts used emotion as an important form of social and cultural distinction, as the attribution of sentience and feeling helped to define who would be recognized as human.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801884306
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2006
Edition description:	ANN
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lynn Festa is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Great World Without
1. The Distinction of Sentimental Feeling
Sentimental Babel
Hume, Smith, and the Property of Feeling
French Sympathy and the Model of the Human
The Sentimental Wealth of Nations
Romance, Epic, and the Sentimental Rewriting of Eighteenth-Century Empire
2. Sterne's Snuffbox
Yorick's Snuffbox and the Paradox of the Sentimental Commodity
Emotions in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Tristram Shandy and the Befetish'd Word
The Sentimental Deficit and the Journal to Eliza
3. Tales Told by Things
The People Things Make
The Commodity's Soliloquy
Thinking Through Things
Subject and Object in Olaudah Equiano's Life
4. Making Humans Human
Of Price and Men
Day, Cowper, Wedgwood, and the Tropes of Redundant Personification
Discriminating Figures in Janet Schaw's Journal
Political Sympathies and the Sympathetic Misfire
Usurpation and Empathy in Parliamentary Debates
Reversible Figures
5. Global Commerce in Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes
Commerce as the Motor of the World
Lachrymose Intolerance
Human Interest
Coda: The Peripheral Vision of the Enlightenment
Notes
Works Cited
Index

What People are Saying About This

Robert Markley

Extremely well written and very persuasive in suggesting how the discourses of sympathetic identification work to reinscribe various forms of social, gender, and imperial difference. While there are numerous studies devoted to the literary construction of sentimental selfhood in the eighteenth century and a rapidly growing body of work on the genesis of the British empire, no other critic has argued so convincingly for a dialectical approach to the relationship between sentimental texts and the larger sociocultural effects of imperial designs and operations.

— Robert Markley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Deidre Shauna Lynch

Thoughtful, witty, and brimming over with insight and information, Sentimental Figures of Empire offers the best explanation I know of how and why the language of sentimentalism became the preferred idiom for both vindicating and critiquing Europeans' colonial activities. Scholars of Enlightenment philosophy, of abolitionism, of the French and British novel will all benefit from—and be moved by—this rich account of sympathy's global travels during the long eighteenth century.

— Deidre Shauna Lynch, Indiana University

From the Publisher

Extremely well written and very persuasive in suggesting how the discourses of sympathetic identification work to reinscribe various forms of social, gender, and imperial difference. While there are numerous studies devoted to the literary construction of sentimental selfhood in the eighteenth century and a rapidly growing body of work on the genesis of the British empire, no other critic has argued so convincingly for a dialectical approach to the relationship between sentimental texts and the larger sociocultural effects of imperial designs and operations.
—Robert Markley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

With considerable verve and tenacity, Lynn Festa demonstrates that the sentimental mode in the eighteenth century was inextricable from the colonial beginnings of empire. The flinty lightness of Festa’s readings cannily resembles the subtlety and style of the varied examples she deftly analyzes, from the snuffbox in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey to the perorations in Raynal’s History of the Two Indies. By documenting how writers during the period ventriloquize ostensibly mute slaves as well as inanimate objects, Festa shows how sentimentalism challenged—and also extended—the reach of empire. By plumbing the complexity of eighteenth-century mercantilist and abolitionist discourses, this study breaks new ground in the scholarship about sentimentalism.
—Srinivas Aravamudan, Duke University

Thoughtful, witty, and brimming over with insight and information, Sentimental Figures of Empire offers the best explanation I know of how and why the language of sentimentalism became the preferred idiom for both vindicating and critiquing Europeans' colonial activities. Scholars of Enlightenment philosophy, of abolitionism, of the French and British novel will all benefit from—and be moved by—this rich account of sympathy's global travels during the long eighteenth century.
—Deidre Shauna Lynch, Indiana University

Srinivas Aravamudan

With considerable verve and tenacity, Lynn Festa demonstrates that the sentimental mode in the eighteenth century was inextricable from the colonial beginnings of empire. The flinty lightness of Festa’s readings cannily resembles the subtlety and style of the varied examples she deftly analyzes, from the snuffbox in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey to the perorations in Raynal’s History of the Two Indies. By documenting how writers during the period ventriloquize ostensibly mute slaves as well as inanimate objects, Festa shows how sentimentalism challenged—and also extended—the reach of empire. By plumbing the complexity of eighteenth-century mercantilist and abolitionist discourses, this study breaks new ground in the scholarship about sentimentalism.

— Srinivas Aravamudan, Duke University

Editorial Reviews

Thoroughly researched and densely annotated, this is a book for scholars of 18th century literature, culture, society, and ideas.
—Choice

Festa's supple prose serves her well . . . She is capable both of the judicious concession . . . and the head-on confrontation.
—Deidre Lynch, Studies in English Literature

Engaging and erudite book.
—Jennifer Pitts, American Historical Review

There is great originality in this book, and even where we find what oft was thought, it’s rarely so well expressed.
—Cynthia Wall, Eighteenth-Century Life

As a comparative cultural history, Professor Festa’s study offers a sound and especially persuasive argument for researching from the early modern era the emerging social relationships between the self and the objectified other in relation to empire, whether in the sentimental novel or elsewhere.
—Christine Clark-Evans, Comparative Literature Studies

Most memorable for unearthing the volatile politics of the sentimental form.
—Roxann Wheeler, Scriblerian

Festa's account of the shortcomings (and the strengths) of imperialist benevolence in the eighteenth century is unusually deft and lucid.
—Carolyn Vellenga Berman, Novel

Sentimental Figures is, put simply, a terrific book, and perhaps most especially so in the willingness of its author, Lynn Festa, to consider groundbreaking subject matter . . . in at once theoretically astute and historically nuanced ways.
—Abby L. Coykendall, 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries

A beautifully written and compellingly argued book about 'the margins of the Enlightenment.'
—Cynthia Wall, Eighteenth-Century Life

A remarkable scholarly and theoretical achievement . . . original and powerful.
—Eighteenth-Century Fiction

From the Publisher

As a comparative cultural history, Professor Festa’s study offers a sound and especially persuasive argument for researching from the early modern era the emerging social relationships between the self and the objectified other in relation to empire, whether in the sentimental novel or elsewhere.

Comparative Literature Studies - Christine Clark-Evans

There is great originality in this book, and even where we find what oft was thought, it’s rarely so well expressed.

Eighteenth-Century Life - Cynthia Wall

Festa's supple prose serves her well . . . She is capable both of the judicious concession . . . and the head-on confrontation.

Studies in English Literature - Deidre Lynch

Most memorable for unearthing the volatile politics of the sentimental form.

Scriblerian - Roxann Wheeler

Engaging and erudite book.

American Historical Review - Jennifer Pitts

A remarkable scholarly and theoretical achievement . . . original and powerful.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Thoroughly researched and densely annotated, this is a book for scholars of 18th century literature, culture, society, and ideas.

Choice

Sentimental Figures is, put simply, a terrific book, and perhaps most especially so in the willingness of its author, Lynn Festa, to consider groundbreaking subject matter . . . in at once theoretically astute and historically nuanced ways.

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries - Abby L. Coykendall

Festa's account of the shortcomings (and the strengths) of imperialist benevolence in the eighteenth century is unusually deft and lucid.

Novel - Carolyn Vellenga Berman

Festa's account of the shortcomings (and the strengths) of imperialist benevolence in the eighteenth century is unusually deft and lucid.

— Carolyn Vellenga Berman

Novel

Most memorable for unearthing the volatile politics of the sentimental form.

— Roxann Wheeler

Scriblerian

As a comparative cultural history, Professor Festa’s study offers a sound and especially persuasive argument for researching from the early modern era the emerging social relationships between the self and the objectified other in relation to empire, whether in the sentimental novel or elsewhere.

— Christine Clark-Evans

Comparative Literature Studies

A beautifully written and compellingly argued book about 'the margins of the Enlightenment.'

— Cynthia Wall

Eighteenth-Century Life

Engaging and erudite book.

— Jennifer Pitts

American Historical Review

Festa's supple prose serves her well... She is capable both of the judicious concession... and the head-on confrontation.

— Deidre Lynch

Studies in English Literature