Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

Lynn Festa is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard University.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Great World Without1. The Distinction of Sentimental FeelingSentimental BabelHume, Smith, and the Property of FeelingFrench Sympathy and the Model of the HumanThe Sentimental Wealth of NationsRomance, Epic, and the Sentimental Rewriting of Eighteenth-Century Empire2. Sterne's SnuffboxYorick's Snuffbox and the Paradox of the Sentimental CommodityEmotions in an Age of Mechanical ReproductionTristram Shandy and the Befetish'd WordThe Sentimental Deficit and the Journal to Eliza3. Tales Told by ThingsThe People Things MakeThe Commodity's SoliloquyThinking Through ThingsSubject and Object in Olaudah Equiano's Life4. Making Humans HumanOf Price and MenDay, Cowper, Wedgwood, and the Tropes of Redundant PersonificationDiscriminating Figures in Janet Schaw's JournalPolitical Sympathies and the Sympathetic MisfireUsurpation and Empathy in Parliamentary DebatesReversible Figures5. Global Commerce in Raynal's Histoire des deux IndesCommerce as the Motor of the WorldLachrymose IntoleranceHuman InterestCoda: The Peripheral Vision of the EnlightenmentNotesWorks CitedIndex

Thoroughly researched and densely annotated, this is a book for scholars of 18th century literature, culture, society, and ideas. Choice 2007 Festa's supple prose serves her well... She is capable both of the judicious concession... and the head-on confrontation. -- Deidre Lynch Studies in English Literature 2007 Engaging and erudite book. -- Jennifer Pitts American Historical Review 2008 There is great originality in this book, and even where we find what oft was thought, it's rarely so well expressed. -- Cynthia Wall Eighteenth-Century Life 2009 As a comparative cultural history, Professor Festa's study offers a sound and especially persuasive argument for researching from the early modern era the emerging social relationships between the self and the objectified other in relation to empire, whether in the sentimental novel or elsewhere. -- Christine Clark-Evans Comparative Literature Studies 2008 Most memorable for unearthing the volatile politics of the sentimental form. -- Roxann Wheeler Scriblerian 2008 Festa's account of the shortcomings (and the strengths) of imperialist benevolence in the eighteenth century is unusually deft and lucid. -- Carolyn Vellenga Berman Novel 2007 Sentimental Figures is, put simply, a terrific book, and perhaps most especially so in the willingness of its author, Lynn Festa, to consider groundbreaking subject matter... in at once theoretically astute and historically nuanced ways. -- Abby L. Coykendall 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries 2008 A beautifully written and compellingly argued book about 'the margins of the Enlightenment.' -- Cynthia Wall Eighteenth-Century Life 2009 A remarkable scholarly and theoretical achievement... original and powerful. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2010