Description and Tableau in the Eighteenth-Century British Sentimental Novel
Anne Patricia Williams, University of Toronto
Volume 8, no. 4, July 1996
©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
Received wisdom about the sentimental novel centres on its reliance on typographical detail (dashes and asterisks particularly) and the externalization of subjective states (in descriptions of the physical body) to address the essential ineffability of the novel’s implicit world view. Indeed, the critical discourse about the genre is so utterly saturated by assumptions about the inefficacy of language that scant attention has been paid to the actual methods of literary description in the sentimental tableau, or what I would call “frozen pathos.” I would like to outline the cultural signifiers of pathos in selected sentimental novels of the eighteenth century; these signifiers, I argue, also serve to undercut the sense of privacy, of immediacy, and so inscribe contradiction as one of the very foundations of the genre.
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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