In this ambitious and original study, Lynn Festa examines how and
why sentimental fiction became one of the primary ways of
representing British and French relations with colonial populations
in the eighteenth century. Drawing from novels, poetry, travel
narratives, commerce manuals, and philosophical writings, Festa
shows how sentimentality shaped communal and personal assertions of
identity in an age of empire.
Read in isolation, sentimental texts can be made to tell a
simple story about the emergence of the modern psychological self.
Placed in conversation with empire, however, sentimentality invites
both psychological and cultural readings of the encounter between
self and other. Sentimental texts, Festa claims, enabled readers to
create powerful imagined relations to distant people. Yet these
emotional bonds simultaneously threatened the boundaries between
self and other, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized.
Festa argues that sentimental tropes and figures allowed readers to
feel for others, while maintaining the particularity of the
individual self. Sentimental identification thus operated as a form
of differentiation as well as consolidation.
Festa contends that global reach increasingly outstripped
imaginative grasp during this era. Sentimentality became an
important tool for writers on empire, allowing conquest to be
portrayed as commerce and scenes of violence and exploitation to be
converted into displays of benevolence and pity. Above all,
sentimental texts used emotion as an important form of social and
cultural distinction, as the attribution of sentience and feeling
helped to define who would be recognized as human.
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