Beyond Sense and Sensibility: Moral Formation and the Literary Imagination from Johnson to Wordsworth (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850) - Softcover

The nine essays published here are presented as a Festschrift for the great bibliographer and Smollett scholar O. M. Brack . . . The essays themselves range widely in subject: Adam Rounce explores James Boswell's distancing of himself from the less sentimental Dr. Johnson, who (as Mrs. Thrase said) always 'hated a feeler'; Heather King traces Frances Burney's persistent argument that the same 'sensibility' that makes female suffering morally educative to men takes a terrible toll on women themselves. Perhaps the best essays in the collection come in the last section, 'Reframing the Question': the editor's own discussion of Johnson's fear of nonrational 'habit' and James Noggle on the curious fondness during the 'age of sensibility' for the word insensibly (most of all in Gibbon) . . . Every essay in it [the collection] is clear, thoughtful, interesting, and informative. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. * CHOICE *

During the last half of the eighteenth century, sensibility and its less celebrated corollary sense were subject to constant variation, critique, and contestation in ways that raise profound questions about the formation of moral identities and communitie