Although the eighteenth century is often described as the age of reason, authors and readers of the period were heavily occupied with feeling as the guide to truth. Long before the Romantic period, authors drew on images of tearstained pages and created over-sensitive heroes. The terms sentiment and sensibility are part of an eighteenth-century family of concepts, which includes taste, sympathy, virtue, benevolence, and sense, that suggests the emphasis placed in the second half of the century on physical and emotional response. Although sentimentality has come to seem to us a term of critique, it was at the heart of the public celebration of novels such as Laurence Sterne's, A Sentimental Journey, and Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling. Exploring what the terms sentiment and sensibility stand for in eighteenth-century literature will allow us to approach a range of texts from the perspective of their original male and female readers, and to think about this period of rapidly expanding literacy in terms of classics that are often left out of the eighteenth-century canon. These will include Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, poetry by Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, and William Collins, and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. One of the aims of this seminar will be to discuss the connection between eighteenth-century philosophy and the category of literature. In addition to fiction and poetry, we will read key eighteenth-century texts dealing with sentiment and emotional response and will explore how these texts inform and draw on sentiment and sensibility in literature. Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: one 5- to 7-page and one 10- to 14-page paper. Prerequisites: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: 20). (1700-1900)

Hour: LUPTON