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How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or
disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment
thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as
well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the
notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic
criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study
traces the emergence of what became a key concept of
intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions,
Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the
imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which
sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of
ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the
sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional
reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result,
the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy.
Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the
novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book
demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the
sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its
literary and moral potential.
There is little doubt that sympathy plays a pivotal role in
aesthetic as well as moral experience, yet also little agreement on
how to describe this connection and its long history. This volume
investigates the changes in the concept of sympathy as well as its
rhetorical, poetical and ethical functions from antiquity to the
threshold of Romanticism. The focus is on sympathy's development
from a cosmological principle expressing the coherence,
correspondence, and unity of all things into a theoretical key
concept of intersubjectivity informing moral philosophy, criticism
and literature. Thus, Sympathy in Transformation offers important
insights into the many ways in which, when sympathy migrates into
diverse discourses in Early Modernity, its ancient origins dwindle
out of sight, while some of its central elements re-emerge in a
surprising manner.
This open access book attempts to show that an examination of the
list's formal features has the potential to produce genuine
insights into the production of knowledge, the poetics of
literature and the composition of visual art. Following a
conceptual introduction, the twelve single-authored chapters place
the list in a variety of well-researched contexts, including
ancient Roman historiography, medieval painting, Enlightenment
periodicals, nineteenth-century botanical geography, American Beat
poetry and contemporary photobooks. With its interdisciplinary
approach, this book is a unique contribution to an emerging field
dedicated to the study of lists.
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