Dialectics of loss: Sentimental irony and the eighteenth-century British novel (Sarah Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith)

"Dialectics of Loss" makes two original contributions to the study of eighteenth-century literature. The first, a formal contribution, involves a rhetorical figure that I term "sentimental irony." We ordinarily conceive of irony and sentimentality as opposing terms, but many eighteenth-century texts find ways to make the two complement rather than cancel each other. Through readings of Sarah Fielding's Adventures of David Simple, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, I demonstrate some of the rich and complex ways that eighteenth-century writers created both a kind of sentimentality that sharpens irony and a brand of irony that heightens sentimentality.; The second major contribution is more properly thematic: this project offers the first sustained study of loss in the sentimental novel---an oddly overlooked topos, given that sentimental novels are typically fraught with loss. As I argue, sentimental irony offered eighteenth-century writers a variety of strategies for dealing with a variety of losses. To theorize those strategies, I draw on classic Freudian categories to distinguish between two kinds of narratives of loss: one that is structured as an act of mourning (a story about learning to let go of the lost object and finding a healthy substitute for it), and another that resembles melancholia (a story about a lingering, ambivalent attachment to the lost object). Dialectically revising Freud's categories even as I invoke them, I argue that narratives of loss offered eighteenth-century writers a way of grappling with certain of the fundamental social transformations of early modernity. Sarah Fielding's novel, for example, is a failed act of mourning for an early modern crisis in the concept of value. Laurence Sterne's comic masterpiece is a work of exuberant melancholy for fading styles of masculinity. Oliver Goldsmith's novel offers a fiction of mourning that legitimates the installation of bourgeois heteronormative masculinity. By tracing the eighteenth-century novel's complicated path across these dialectics of loss, I offer an account of the eighteenth-century British novel inspired by Walter Benjamin's understanding of history as a permanent state of emergency, an eternally unfolding series of contradictions at once fraught with danger and rife with liberatory possibilities.