Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;Chapter I gives reasons for the practice of literary and intellectual history, in the light of Gadamer's Truth and Method. Two problems are elucidated in this chapter: first, the difficulty of making coherent a concept which crosses discourses and values; and secondly, the difficulty of understanding the effect of contemporary interpretative categories and concerns on past experience. This chapter affirms the importance of history, and explains why this particular history requires a critical and reflective account of meaning. ;Chapter 2 explores the genealogy of sensibility. It is described as passing through emergent, ascendent, and critical stages; roughly corresponding to the movement through late Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods. It is demonstrated with reference to John Locke how the factors contributing to the development of so-called 'individualism'--protestantism, empiricism, and the emergence of new financial and commercial practices--provide the characteristic language for sensibility. ;Chapter 3 explores, with particular relation to Richardson's Clarissa, the difficulties of maintaining personal integrity, and demonstrates how the conflict of sensibility and power generated a 'critical' meaning for sensibility. In its conflict with paternalism it shows how sensibility generated an ethic of inwardness, sympathy, independence, and personal decision. ;Chapter 4 explores the 'problem of personal identity', and is an examination of Lockean self-consciousness in Gray's Elegy. The significance of passion in relation to its physiological and political expression is also explored. This chapter establishes connections between poetry, epistemology, and the economics of commercial society. ;Chapter 5 explores love and narcissism as metaphors for the difficulty of authentic sensibility. William Blake's, Visions of the Daughters of Albion is used to show how sexuality within sensibility can generate a discourse able to transcend but not transform the dominant culture. ;Chapter 6, the conclusion, outlines how sensibility expressed a critical, if finally pessimistic, relationship between the self and society in the middle of the eighteenth century. It highlights the relations between the public and the private sphere, and the way in which the private sensibility was able to register deep anxieties about the public world and the private status of the subject. It suggests that as a form of belief sensibility raised profound questions about the status and nature of modernity