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Sentimentalism (literature) As a literary mode, sentimentalism, the practice of being sentimental, and thus tending towards making emotions and feelings the basis of a person's actions and reactions, as opposed to reason, [1] has been a recurring aspect of world literature. Sentimentalism includes a variety of aspects in literature, such as ...
- Sentimental novel
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an...
- Sentimentality
Sentimentalism in literature refers to techniques a writer...
- Sentimental novel
SENTIMENTALISM. Emerging in England in the mid- to late eighteenth century, and reflecting a similar trend in continental literature at the time, literary sentimentalism or "sensibility" prioritized feeling. It developed primarily as a middle-class phenomenon, reflecting the emphasis on compassion or feeling as a desirable character trait in ...
sentimental novel, broadly, any novel that exploits the reader’s capacity for tenderness, compassion, or sympathy to a disproportionate degree by presenting a beclouded or unrealistic view of its subject. In a restricted sense the term refers to a widespread European novelistic development of the 18th century, which arose partly in reaction ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Classic study of Victorian sentimentality, taking a largely sympathetic and revisionary position in tracing the roots of 19th-century sentimental fictions in 18th-century moral philosophy. Focuses primarily on the novel, and on Dickens and ...
To survey the history of sentimental literature in America is to gain insight into some of the most critical moments in American culture. As Thomas Paine's influential essay of 1776 explained, it is on the grounds of “common sense” that the colonial Englishman would be able to “generously enlarge his views beyond the present day” and so ...
