Men of feeling in eighteenth-century literature: touching fiction

Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature offers a new perspective on the interplay of sentimentalism and self-reflexivity in novels by Sterne, Smollett, Mackenzie, and Henry Brooke. Rather than evidence of eighteenth-century literature's capacity to anticipate (post)modernist metafiction, or an indicator of underlying tensions at the heart of sentimental fiction, self-reflexive practices in these texts, this book argues, can best be accounted for as strategies of 'corporeal defamiliarization.' These strategies denaturalize printed books as intimate things to be felt, whose powers reside not in their transportative potential as windows onto imagined worlds, but in their more tangible properties as physical objects that inspire physiological effects.