Abstract

Men of Feeling revises the history of sexuality via the literary history of eighteenth-century British sentimentalism. I take my cue theoretically from the striking overlap between Michel Foucault's periodization of the advent of the regime of sexuality---chiefly, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries---and the flourishing of a British culture of sensibility and sentiment in these very centuries. Readings of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling , and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France describe how the alliances and divergences between sex and sentiment shaped eighteenth-century notions of reason, conversation, publicity, domesticity, and morality. In order to reconstitute the scope of sentimental culture, I read these authors with reference to their manifest, if sometimes oblique, relation to the various currents of British moral and ethical discourse, including the work of Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, and Hume. Men of Feeling demonstrates how the literature and philosophy of eighteenth-century sentimentalism both informed and contended with emergent notions of "normal" and "perverse" desire and sexuality. Specifically, I describe how the "virtue" of heterosexual desire became necessity, how the culture of sensibility extensively embraced the proposition that life as such is strictly synonymous with the romance of heterosexual desire. But at the same time, I argue, sentimentalism offered a literary and philosophical discourse in which the social rituals of sexuality---such as courtship, marriage, reproduction, and inheritance---could be thought and rethought. A central question orients my reclamation of sentimentalism for critical thinking---indeed, as a form of critical thinking: Does "sexuality" absorb the sentiments, or do the sentiments preserve understandings of self, other, and community that exceed or countermand the order of "sexuality"? By tracing the figure of the "man of feeling" across a century of literary representation and ethical reflection, I argue that the sentiments are neither subsumed nor displaced by sexuality, but rather, sustain distinct---often radical or queer---notions of the self, its affections, and its social relations