Sympathy and the novel: Shared sentiment in Britain and France, 1750--1850

I argue that the novel both reflects and revises philosophical conceptions of sympathy. British and French fiction between 1750 and 1850 creates a version of sympathy that relies on a sustained auditory engagement with narrative. Unlike previous scholarship on sympathy, this study insists on the distinction between sympathy as it is represented between characters and sympathy as it features in the reader's response. This focus in turn emphasizes the narrative potential that representations of sympathy afford the genre of the novel. Prominent in the bustling discussion of sympathy in the eighteenth century is the theory of Adam Smith, who defines sympathy as a series of shifts in point of view. Sympathy, as it is experienced by characters, allows for shifts in point of view that produce interpolated or frame tales as well as transitions from oral to written narrative. The novel negotiates a narrative version of sympathy that compensates for the frequent impossibility of a face-to-face sympathetic experience. This negotiation is undertaken across different subgenres and publication practices, from epistolary novels by Rousseau and Henry Mackenzie through the interpolated novellas of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand as well as the anthologized sentimental novels of Mackenzie and Sterne to gothic frame tales by Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte. Sympathy and the Novel locates the representation of sympathy at the center of the novel's experimentation with point of view and narrative structure across this hundred-year span.