Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition

Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb

By (author) Valerie Purton

Publication date:

15 August 2012

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780857284181

‘Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition’ is a timely study of the ‘sentimental’ in Dickens’s novels, which places them in the context of the tradition of Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan and Lamb. This study re-evaluates Dickens’s presentation of emotion – first within the eighteenth-century tradition and then within the dissimilar nineteenth-century tradition – as part of a complex literary heritage that enables him to critique nineteenth-century society. The book sheds light on the construction of feelings and of the ‘good heart’, ideas which resonate with current critical debates about literary ‘affect’. Sentimentalism, as the text demonstrates, is crucial to understanding fully the achievement of Dickens and his contemporaries.

Introduction; Chapter 1: Dickens and the Sentimentalist Tradition; Chapter 2: Sentimentalism and its Discontents in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Fielding, Richardson and Sterne; Chapter 3: Sentimentalism and its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century Drama: Goldsmith and Sheridan; Chapter 4: Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Drama; Chapter 5: The Early Novels and ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’; Chapter 6: The Later Novels; Conclusion: The Afterlife of Sentimentalism

‘If you thought Oscar Wilde’s laughter at the death of Little Nell said it all about the sentimental Dickens, this radical revaluation of the complex tradition of literary and theatrical sentimentalism, culminating with distinctive power in Dickens’s fiction, will make you think – and maybe weep – again. Scholarly criticism of rare courage and conviction.’ —Dr Rick Allen, Anglia Ruskin University