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UMI' Touching Fiction: Embodied Narrative Self-Reflexivity and Eighteenth-Century British Sentimental Novels By Alex Wetmore B.A. (Hon), M.A. A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Cultural Mediations Carleton University Ottawa, Canada August, 2009 © Copyright 2009, Alex Wetmore Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reticence ISBN: 978-0-494-63857-6 Our file Notre r6f6rence ISBN: 978-0-494-63857-6 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1*1 Canada Abstract: Title: Touching Fiction: Embodied Narrative Self-Reflexivity and Eighteenth- Century British Sentimental Novels Author: Alex Wetmore Degree: PhD Year: 2009 Institution: Carleton University Supervisors: Paul Keen and Mark Salber Phillips This thesis examines the intersection of sentimentalism and self-reflexive narrative practices in eighteenth-century novels featuring men of feeling. Major works in the sentimental canon such as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), and Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker (1771) include men of feeling as a means of dramatizing the benefits as well as the anxieties of aligning sympathetic human nature with the body's sensibility. However, these works also share a tendency to employ self-referential narrative techniques - including typographical play, editorial and authorial intrusion, multiple competing narrative voices, fragmentation, digression, and a proliferation of printerly metaphors - that betray a distinctly eighteenth-century concern for the book as a physical object, and for the parallels between printed books and human bodies. My thesis argues that these narrative methods could be productively approached as strategies of corporeal defamiliarization, which support the moral and aesthetic aims of sentimentalism by engaging with the materiality of texts and drawing attention to the embodied characteristics of both literary and affective experience. This project traces the genealogy of the connection between sentimentalism and an embodied mode of narrative self-reflexivity from dual origins in Augustan satire and the Scottish Enlightenment, to its manifestations in the novels of Sterne, Smollett, and Mackenzie, and to the gradual loss of coherence of this connection in post-Revolution fiction such as Robert Bage's Hermsprong (1796) and Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). Along the way, individual chapters focus on specific insights into sentimentalism's relationship to larger debates in the period about language, technology, medicine, and gender. Ultimately, I argue, these insights taken together reveal (a) the subtle and complex means by which sentimentalism adapts neoclassical ideals of virtue to the needs and concerns of an increasingly modern and commercial British society, and (b) that sentimentalism could be regarded as a later manifestation of somaticism, a worldview that rose to prominence around the turn of the eighteenth century. As critics including Richard Kroll and Deidre Lynch have examined, the somatic cultural imagination of eighteenth-century Britain balances a privileging of embodied experience with a sophisticated appreciation for the mediated and unstable foundations of knowledge, identity and value. in For Heather McAlpine IV Acknowledgments Thanks are due first and foremost to my advisors, Paul Keen and Mark Salber Phillips, both of whom displayed great patience while offering much needed moral and intellectual support, welcome encouragement, and equally welcome productive criticism throughout the long process of putting this project together. I would like to give special thanks as well to Julie Murray and Paul Theberge for their support and advice, and to the staff at ICSLAC and the English department at Carleton University for their help over the years. Thanks also are due to the many friends and colleagues who offered help, support, and timely distractions over the years. There are too many to name, but I would like to at least mention the "Thesis Club Crew" of Janne Cleveland, Dave Lafferty, Robert Evans, Paul and Sylvie Jasen; the ICSLAC graduate softball team, especially co-organizers Margaret Rose, Terrence Odin, Paul Shannon, Robert Evans, and co-founder Chris Faulkner; my office mate Rob Winger; and great friends Ryan Stephenson and Colleen Fulton. Also, thanks to my parents, who never put pressure on me to stop this nonsense and get a real job. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the significant support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Graduate Scholarships program for providing me with scholarships throughout my doctoral candidacy, as well as the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research and the Graduate Students Association at Carleton University for supporting my research and conferencing with travel grants. Lastly, some parts from the second chapter, "Feeling/Machines," will be included in a forthcoming article for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Fall 2009) and I would like to thank the journal for allowing me to include this material here. v Table of Contents Abstract ii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v Table of Contents vi Introduction: Structuring Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 1 - Revisiting the Genealogy of Sentimentalism 9 - Origins of Sentimental Self-Reflexivity 14 - Outlining the Project 22 Chapter 1: Body/Language 30 Part I: Sterne, Metafiction and Self-Reflexivity 34 in Art and Literature - Sterne's "mad, inexplicable thing" and the Culture of Sensibility 39 Part II: Language, Self-Reflexivity and Sentimentalism 42 - Men of Feeling "Put in Jeopardy by Words" 42 - Sentimentalism: A "Complexional Philosophy" 47 - Sentimentalism and Narrative Form 52 - "Emotion Beyond Words": Corporeal Defamiliarization 57 and Print Culture Part III: Body/Language and Sentimental Philosophy 65 - Background: Locke, Language, and Somaticism 65 - Somaticism and Sentimentalism: Hartley, Karnes, and Smith 70 - David Hartley 71 - Henry Home, Lord Karnes 76 - Adam Smith 79 - Conclusion 83 Chapter 2: Feeling/Machines 86 - Introduction: Private Copies and Public Sentiments 86 - Social Butterflies and Mechanical Pineapples: 92 Gender and the Automaton - "An Engine, the Parts of Which are Men": Commerce, 96 Civic Humanism and the Mechanical - "The Vulgar Idea of Imitation": Mechanical Copying 100 and the Liberal Arts - "Sacred Symbols Poured on Cox's Mind": The Automaton 108 in Eighteenth-Century Britain vi - Something like an Automaton: Men of Feeling as 115 Sentimental Machines - Sentimental Reconciliations 123 Chapter 3: Public/Health 129 Introduction: Physical Books and Books of "Physick" 129 Part I: "Sound Health" and Virtuous Sensibility 132 - Healthy Fiction and Corporeal Defamiliarization 142 Part II: Sentimentalism and "The Spectre of Illness" 147 - Hacks and Quacks 152 Part HI: Medicine, Sensibility and Somatic Scepticism 158 - "A Sensible Fluidity": Sentimentalism and the 161 Nervous Paradigm - Physiognomy: or, Momus' Glass Revisited 165 - The Rise of the English Spa 171 - "Hospital of the Nation" or "Rendez-Vous of the Diseased"?: 181 Smollett and Spa Towns Chapter 4: Sensible/Women 190 - Introduction 190 - Public Women, Private Virtues 201 - Virtue Subordinated: The Limitations of Femininity 206 within Sentimentalism - Disciplining Female Readers: Women Critics of Sentimentalism 210 Quixotic Female Readers I 215 - "These Foolish Books [. .] Have Turned Her Brain!": 217 Lennox's The Female Quixote - "So Tender - Forsooth!": Female Quixotism in 224 Humphry Clinker Quixotic Female Readers II 228 - "All the Horrors of Romance": Quixotism