What helpful similarities or differences do you discern between these two writers and the ways in which they appeal to and describe the emotions/sentiments?
A few additional data points:
(1) the terms "sensibility" and "sentimentality" are (as the group presenting on Wednesday pointed out) often used interchangability. Yet critics (both in the C18 and the C21 writing about Sterne more frequently use the word "sentimentality" in discussing his work than "sensibility."
(2) My senior colleague, Bob Markley, writes, "Sentimentality--the affective spectacle of benign generosity--emerges early in the eighteenth century less as a purely "literary" phenomenon than as a series of discursive formations that describe what amounts to an aesthetics of moral sensitivity, the ways in which middle- and upper-class men can act upon their "natural," benevolent feelings for their fellow creatures." (Robert Markley, "Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue," The New 18th Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown [New York: Methuen, 1987], p. 211).
Discuss!
Deadline: Monday (2/21), 1pm. Posts before midnight on Saturday (2/19) will count towards Week 5; posts after midnight will count towards Week 6.
2 comments:
I think both authors are similar in that they shed a positvie light on sensibility. Both also seem to think that it has its roots somewhere deep in the soul and almost where it cannot be so controlled by the self. However Cowper seems to deal more with the larger picture by looking beyond the self and even further than that, beyond the British sensibility. Using his account of Omai he connects sensibility to the human experience. In this way he seems to focus more on benevolence than the individuals experience.
It is interesting that sentimentality is used more readily to describe Sterne's work, since the words are so similar in meaning. I wonder if it has somethint to do with the fact that sensibility is a term that was often used to descibe effeminate behaviors.
I see some similarities between Akenside and Cowper in the ways that they view sentimentality. Sentiment at that time was another way to describe a calmer, more reasonable emotion. Akenside shows this definition of sentiment in his term "her" (line 557) when he personifies virtue. He praises virtue's characteristics and what it does for the people it affects.
Cowper is similar to Akenside in his description of Omai in that he has kind feelings towards him even though he is not a native of England. He shows feelings towards the man and his home country but at the same time, he feels bad that England did not colonize the land to provide more resources for Omai and his people.
Although sentimentality is seen in two different ways, depending on the work being discussed, they both provide readers with a view of sentimentality different than we now understand the word.
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