Original scientific paper
The Transatlantic Anglophone Literature of the Eighteenth Century: a New Sensibility, Sentimentalism and the Modern Self
Jelena Šesnić
; Faculty of humanities and social sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
Taking off from Charles Taylor’s premise about the key institutions of the Western modernity – the economic sphere (the market), the self-governing people (the political sphere), and the public sphere – that emerge or consolidate in the course of the eighteenth century in the transatlantic scope, the argument focuses in particular on the cultural reverberations of the constitution of the bourgeois civil society and a representative individual, a man or a woman of the middling sort or, the middle class. The new social imaginaries coming into play in the ambit of the transatlantic geo-culture of the eighteenth century (Shapiro) are considered by way of a nascent public print sphere being marked by the appearance of the novel and other forms of print. Representative texts, circulating in the ambit of England and its diaspora (the American colonies), consist of Daniel Defoe’s early novel Moll Flanders (1722); Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography (1771–1789); and the British-American late sentimental novel Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson (1791, 1794). Consequently, the important impulse provided by Adam Smith’s model of moral sentiments is taken to have crystallized or spurred the tendencies observable in these works, as Smithian moral synthesis builds on the work of his predecessors while charting new notions of a moral universe inhabited by self-regulating, self-interested but humanely, benevolently disposed individuals. Further studies of the period have marked the paramount transformative agency of the public sphere and the channel of print, allowing us to locate in the literary sphere an important repertoire of social practices, manners and values informing the new modern subject. Additional attention is given to the cultural underpinnings of the contractual consensual theory of social relations that opens up limited but unprecedented at the time opportunities for women to claim their share of the public sphere. The foregoing tendencies have contributed to the ongoing reconceptualization of the transatlantic eighteenth century as a new, burgeoning area of inquiry in the Anglophone literary and cultural studies.
Keywords
sensibility; sentimentalism; transatlanticism; modernity; individualism; the public sphere; the print
Hrčak ID:
233558
URI
Publication date:
5.2.2020.
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