Article ID: CBB001201889

Feeling Things: The Novel Objectives of Sentimental Objects (2013)

unapi

By treating eighteenth-century it-narratives as self-conscious miscellanies of newly established literary conventions and by focusing on their scenes of sensory defamiliarization, this essay suggests that it-narratives function as more than just critiques of mass consumption in the literary marketplace. Rather, it-narratives ironically foreground depictions of the five senses, especially touch, as a means to theorize how the rise of realist fiction ushered in a dramatic epistemological shift. Specifically, when read in the context of philosophical works by John Locke and David Hartley, it-narratives emerge as sophisticated meditations on the ways fiction's pretensions to verisimilitude threatened to refashion readers' sensual and empirical engagement with the world around them. Keywords

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Authors & Contributors
Lenzi, Massimiliano
Franco D'Intino
Amelia Urry
Antonella Pagano
Elisabetta Orsini
Hellawell, Philippa
Concepts
Senses and sensation; perception
Empiricism
Science and culture
Observation
Natural philosophy
Science and literature
Time Periods
18th century
17th century
Early modern
Medieval
19th century
Renaissance
Places
Great Britain
England
Netherlands
Russia
Institutions
Royal Society of London
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