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SENTIMENTALISM 
Emerging in England in the mid- to late eighteenth century, and reflecting a similar trend in 
continental literature at the time, literary sentimentalism or "sensibility" prioritized feeling. It 
developed primarily as a middle-class phenomenon, reflecting the emphasis on compassion or 
feeling as a desirable character trait in the newly emergent middle class. Although, on the one 
hand, the reader might take pleasure in feeling itself, in England by the 1770s the rise of 
sensibility was also linked to a growing activism—the awareness of and concern for the 
suffering of others reflected in, for example, the antislavery movement, concerns about child 
labor, and the campaigns for better hospitals, prison reform, and charity schools as well as in the 
response to the suffering associated with the rapid rise of industrial capitalism and the urban 
misery caused by exploitative labor practices. 
Sentimentalism received its fullest expression in Great Britain, where the ideology of the third es
tate, as well as its internalcontradictions, first appeared. According to the sentimentalists, the do
minant chord of human nature is feeling, and notreason, which is compromised by bourgeois pra
ctices. Sentimentalism did not break completely with the Enlightment butremained loyal to the id
eal of a normative personality, establishing as the precondition for its development not a rationalr
estructuring of the world but the liberation and perfection of “natural” feelings. In sentimental lit

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erature of the Enlightenmentthe hero is more individualized, and his inner world is enriched by h
is ability to empathize and to respond sensitively to whatis going on around him. By origin or co
nviction, the sentimental hero is a democrat. The rich inner world of the common manwas one of
the chief discoveries and triumphs of sentimentalism. 
In contrast to preromanticism, a parallel movement, sentimentalism rejected the irrational. Contr
adictory moods andemotional impulses were subjected to rationalistic interpretation by sentiment
alism, which found the dialectic of the soulcomprehensible. The main features of British sentime
ntalism, as represented by Goldsmith, the later works of Smollett, andH. Mackenzie, are an emot
ional sensitivity that is not without exaggeration, as well as irony and humor that permit a parodi
cdeflation of the Enlightenment canon and simultaneously a skeptical attitude toward the possibil
ities of sentimentalism. (The last is characteristic of Sterne’s works, for example.) 
The literary genres of sentimentalism included the elegy, the letter, the epistolary novel, travel no
tes, diaries, and other proseforms in which the “confessional motif is prominent. In sentimentalis
t literature, openness verging on selfexposure resulted inan extraordinary increase in interest in t
he writer’s personality. Sometimes the writer became the “hero” of biographical 
legends. The aspect of the writer’s creative
individuality became fundamental in the aesthetics of romanticism.