What makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of the benevolent, compassionate ideology of eighteenth-century sensibility? This book explores forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swoons and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century literary, philosophical and scientific texts.
"Ildiko Csengei's Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century is a capacious study of a topic that has and will continue to have broad interest for eighteenth-century scholars. ... Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling is readable and engaging throughout and is supported both by extensive substantive notes and by a careful bibliography." (Ann Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 28 (3), Spring, 2016)
"Ildiko Csengei's Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century . . . addresses the overlap between philosophy, psychology, and medicine . . . Many of the authors covered by Csengei are familiar figures in the canons of sensibility - Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, Richardson, Mackenzie, Rousseau - but careful yet imaginative readings offer new insights." - Years' Work in English Studies
"Ildiko Csengei's Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century . . . addresses the overlap between philosophy, psychology, and medicine . . . Many of the authors covered by Csengei are familiar figures in the canons of sensibility - Shaftesbury, Hume, Smith, Richardson, Mackenzie, Rousseau - but careful yet imaginative readings offer new insights." - Years' Work in English Studies