Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling

Download or read book Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling written by M. Bell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2000-09-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling defends feeling against customary distrust or condescension by showing that the affective turn of the eighteenth-century cult of sentiment, despite its sometimes surreal manifestations, has led to a positive culture of feeling. The very reaction against sentimentalism has taught us to identity sentimentality. Fiction, moreover, remains a principal means not just of discriminating quality of feeling but of appreciating its essentially imaginative nature.