Ev’ry Lost Relation: Historical Fictions and Sentimental Incidents in Sophia Lee’s The Recess
Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, University of California
Volume 7, no. 2, January 1995
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
What did Mary Queen of Scots have to do with the rise of historical fiction in Britain? Quite a lot if we picture that fiction as heir to two of the mid-eighteenth century’s seemingly opposite accomplishments — the discontinuous idiom of sensibility and the linear, coherent narratives of enlightenment historiography. My epigraphs all place Mary Stuart at a point where modern historiography meets sentimental discourse. Each identifies her with a kind of sign — pictorial, particular, and emotionally provocative — that troubles any dispassionate linguistic structure bent on replicating the seamless passage of chronological time.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Sentimental Fiction” include:
Devotional Reading and Novel Form: The Case of David Simple
by TERA PETTELLA (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
“Women Love to Have Their Own Way”: Delusion, Volition, and “Freaks” of Sight in Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism
by W.C. HARRIS (ECF 23.3, Spring 2011)
Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity: Sentimental Irony and Downward Mobility in David Simple
by JAMES KIM (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
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