Sentimentalism

I. The nature of Sentimentalism

v      Sentimentalism is one of the important trends in English literature of the middle and later decades of the 18th century.

v      Along with a new vision of love, sentimentalism presented a new view of human nature which prized feeling over thinking, passion over reason, and personal instincts of "pity, tenderness, and benevolence" over social duties.

v      Literary work of the sentimentalism, marked by a sincere sympathy for the poverty-stricken, expropriated peasants, wrote the "simple annals of the poor”.

v      Writers of sentimentalism justly criticized the cruelty of the capitalist relations and the gross social injustices brought about by the bourgeois revolutions.

v      But they attacked the progressive aspect of this great social change in order to eliminate it and sighed for the return of the patriarchal times which they idealized.

v       Sentimentalism embraces a pessimistic outlook and blames reason and the Industrial Revolution for the miseries and injustices in the aristocratic-bourgeois society and  indulges in sentiment, hence the definite signs of decadence in the literary works of the sentimental tradition.

II. Social background of Sentimentalism

v      The bourgeoisie gaining their ascendancy in national politics in England after the two revolutions of 1640 and 1688.

v      The handicrafts labour gradually transformed to machine industry in the course of the Industrial Revolution in the middle and later decades of the 18th century

v      The new capitalist relations were established.

v      Sharp social contradictions began to take shape and to threaten the short-lived social stability in the early decades of the 18th century.

v      The continuous, large-scale enclosures of land resulted in rural bankruptcy.

v      The poverty and misery of the exploited and unemployed labouring masses in the cities increased.

v      The Enlightenment which believed in educating the people to be kind and righteous and upheld reason as the cure-all for all social wrongs and miseries declined.

v      All this led to skepticism and disbelief in the myth about the bourgeois society as the best of all possible worlds

v      Lack of a better or more sound substitute for reason as the instrument to reform the none-too-satisfactory or even highly unsatisfactory society, sentiment or even an over-dose of sentiment was indulged in at least as a sort of relief if not as a salvo for the grieves and heart-aches felt toward the world's wrongs

v      Hence sentimentalism in literature.

III. Literary Forms in Sentimentalism

v      In English poetry of the 18th century, sentimentalism first found its full expression in the forties and the fifties; In the later decades of the century, strains of sentimentalism may still be found in a number of the poems of William Cowper.

v      In English drama of the century, the true founder of sentimental comedy has often been traced back to Richard Steele whose comedies "The Lying Lover" (1703) and "The Conscious Lovers" contained elements of sentimentalism as a sort of reaction to the immoral comedies of manners of the Restoration period.

v      in the field of prose fiction that sentimentalism had its most outstanding expression, Oliver Goldsmith's "The Vicar of Wakefield" may be considered as representative works of this category.

v      Oliver Goldsmith’s poetry and prose fiction was quite an exponent of sentimentalism.

v      Laurence Sterne was the most prominent and the most typical of the sentimental tradition among all English novelists and among all English writers of the 18th century.