University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press
Pages: 226
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-61148-640-7 • Hardback • December 2014 • $116.00 • (£89.00)
978-1-61148-642-1 • Paperback • October 2016 • $46.99 • (£36.00)
978-1-61148-641-4 • eBook • December 2014 • $44.50 • (£34.00)
Peggy Thompson is Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College.
List of Illustrations
Foreword: In Memoriam O M Brack, Jr. (1938-2012)
Timothy Erwin
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I Revisiting Sensibility
Chapter One: Boswell and the Limits of Sensibility
Adam Rounce
Chapter Two: “Beshrew the sombre pencil!”: Robert Fergusson and Sensibility in Scotland
Rhona Brown
Chapter Three: Pictures of Women in Frances Burney’s Cecilia and Camilla: How Cecilia Looks and What Camilla Sees
Heather King
Part II Rethinking Didacticism
Chapter Four: Artful Instruction: Philip Doddridge’s Life of Colonel James Gardiner
Christopher D. Johnson
Chapter Five: Two Singularly Moral Works: Fenelon’s The Adventure of Telemachus and Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
Leslie A. Chilton
Chapter Six: The Politically Engaged Child: Charlotte Smith’s Children’s Literature and the Discourse of Sensibility
Adrianne Wadewitz
Part III Reframing the Questions
Chapter Seven: Habit and Reason in Samuel Johnson’s Rambler
Peggy Thompson
Chapter Eight: Unfelt Affect
James Noggle
Chapter Nine: Seeing into the Life of Things: Re-Viewing Early Wordsworth through Object-Oriented Philosophy
Evan Gottlieb
Works Cited
Index
About the Contributors
The nine essays published here are presented as a Festschrift for the great bibliographer and Smollett scholar O. M. Brack . . . The essays themselves range widely in subject: Adam Rounce explores James Boswell’s distancing of himself from the less sentimental Dr. Johnson, who (as Mrs. Thrase said) always 'hated a feeler'; Heather King traces Frances Burney’s persistent argument that the same 'sensibility' that makes female suffering morally educative to men takes a terrible toll on women themselves. Perhaps the best essays in the collection come in the last section, 'Reframing the Question': the editor’s own discussion of Johnson’s fear of nonrational 'habit' and James Noggle on the curious fondness during the 'age of sensibility' for the word insensibly (most of all in Gibbon) . . . Every essay in it [the collection] is clear, thoughtful, interesting, and informative. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.
— Choice Reviews