During the last half of the eighteenth century, sensibility and its less celebrated corollary sense were subject to constant variation, critique, and contestation in ways that raise profound questions about the formation of moral identities and communities. Beyond Sense and Sensibility addresses those questions. What authority does reason retain as a moral faculty in an age of sensibility? How reliable or desirable is feeling as a moral guide or a test of character? How does such a focus contribute to moral isolation and elitism or, conversely, social connectedness and inclusion? How can we distinguish between that connectedness and a disciplinary socialization? How do insensible processes contribute to our moral formation and action? What alternatives lie beyond the anthropomorphism implied by sense and sensibility? Drawing extensively on philosophical thought from the eighteenth century as well as conceptual frameworks developed in the twenty-first century, this volume of essays examines moral formation represented in or implicitly produced by a range of texts, including Boswell's literary criticism, Fergusson's poetry, Burney's novels, Doddridge's biography, Smollett's novels, Charlotte Smith's children's books, Johnson's essays, Gibbon's history, and Wordsworth's poetry. The distinctive conceptual and textual breadth of Beyond Sense and Sensibility yields a rich reassessment and augmentation of the two perspectives summarized by the terms sense and sensibility in later eighteenth-century Britain.

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture reflects new and highly promising directions of research in the field. The latest volume contains essays by Paula R. Backscheider on theatrical spectacle and by April London on anecdote in Sarah Fielding, as well as considerations of translation in Dennis by Sarah B. Stein, of family in Defoe by Ann Campbell, of ideology in Fantomina by Patricia Comitini, of popular music in Rousseau by Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden. In addition, readers will find studies of the body in Berkeley by Joanne E. Myers, of prostitution in Restif de la Bretonne by Rori Bloom, of ruins in Lazzaro Spallanzani by Sabrina Ferri, of Arthur Murphy's female characters by Barbara Mackey King, and of recent film adaptations of the century's masterworks by Karen Gevirtz.