BARS Blog

Ewan Jones is presently Thole Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge; previously, he completed his PhD at King’s College, Cambridge.  He is interested in the uses and implications of verse forms; in aesthetics; in conceptual histories; and in the works of a wide variety of poets with careers spanning from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries.  His doctoral research focused particularly on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and this work forms the basis for his first monograph, Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form, which has just been published by Cambridge University Press and which we discuss below.

1) How did you come to decide that you wanted to write a book on the relationship between verse form and philosophical thought in Coleridge’s poetry?

I’m well aware that Coleridge might seem the most obvious figure for any such inquiry.  After all, here’s a romantic poet who, even in the later period of life when his verse output allegedly diminishes, still formulates many of his philosophical convictions (from the symbol to the primary and secondary imaginations) in roughly ‘poetical’ terms.  But as I looked more deeply into recent Coleridge scholarship, it became increasingly apparent to me that there was a pronounced unwillingness specifically to consider his verse, as opposed to his writing on verse.  In part this is for good reasons: Kathleen Coburn’s version of the Notebooks, alongside the Bollingen Series Collected Works (without either of which my book would clearly have been impossible) have massively expanded our sense of Coleridge’s intellectual breadth, and therefore encouraged much work on the previously unpublished or marginal prose writings.  I think, however, that this remarkable burst of publication calls for a re-assessment of Coleridge’s poetry—not merely as one more item in his intellectual achievement, but as a specific medium that enabled Coleridge to explore ideas in a manner that he couldn’t have in any other form.  It’s interesting to see that over the long period that I researched and wrote the project (first as a dissertation, and then as the book), Jim Mays also came to a similar conclusion, in his Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics (2013), which appeared just too late for me to engage with it.  I certainly don’t worry about too large an overlap, however: rather, I see both projects as a hopeful sign that Coleridge’s poetry might once again come in for the sort of sustained attention that it merits; and while we have similar starting-points, Mays and I read that poetry to very different ends.

2) In your introduction, you contend that Coleridge’s versification has been neglected in recent years. What, in your eyes, do we stand to gain by re-engaging with this aspect of his work?

First off, I think that we can rescue Coleridge’s verse both from neglect and from a common sort of intellectual dismissal.  The neglect I’ve described in the previous answer; the dismissal takes a variety of forms.  I’ve always found it of great interest that Coleridge’s reputation suffered at the hands both of deconstruction and new historicism—think respectively of de Man’s ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, and of Jerome McGann’s extremely powerful charge of Romantic Ideology (although McGann has elsewhere written more positively and quite wonderfully on Coleridge).  What these dismissals have in common is the association of Coleridge with a kind of self-sufficient formalism that he certainly did inspire (see the New Critics), but which unnecessarily limits the scope of his thinking. By seeing the dynamic and often conflictual relation between Coleridge’s verse and his philosophy, we don’t only better understand the former, but also complicate the latter.  The often remarkable revisions that Coleridge made to his conversation poem sequence throughout his life, for instance, both anticipate and test his affiliation and later disillusionment with ‘transcendental’ idealism.  In my chapter on ‘Christabel’, by contrast, I show that Coleridge’s wavering uncertainty over ‘passion’ as a reactive or a generative force emerges also at the level of his late philosophical writing—specifically, his essay ‘On the Passions’ (1828), which carries out a revisionary reading of Descartes’ Passions of the Soul, yet which is yet to receive any critical attention.  But of course I have aspirations for this book beyond Coleridge himself.  If his symbol or ‘organic unity’ always were more complex than some more recent critics have alleged, perhaps this goes to show that we need to recognise our habitual associations of formalism with autonomy, the occlusion of history, etc.  To this end, my coda reads Kenneth Burke, in many respects the most Coleridgean of all twentieth-century critics, whose attention to literary form could never be reduced in such a manner—yet who currently languishes in obscurity for reasons, I claim, that are structurally comparable to our current treatment of Coleridge himself.

3) How did you select the four poems upon which your chapters principally focus, and were there other options which you considered?

I found the process of selecting the poems extremely difficult—so much so that, despite having four chapters, I hardly restrict myself to four poems.  The first chapter deals with five of Coleridge’s so-called conversation poems, while later sections treat much verse that is unfamiliar or currently out of favour: from some of Coleridge’s curious late allegories (despite his animadversions against the mode), such as ‘The Pang More Sharp than All’, to a series of extremely strange translations that he made of his friend Hyman Hurwitz’s Jewish dirges.  I knew from the start that I had to write about the conversation poems and ‘Christabel’, given a pledge to self to do so long ago.  In the cases of the third and fourth chapters, I found myself exploring specific philosophical problems (respectively, the issues of paronomasia or punning, and of self-identity or tautology), before belatedly realising that one of the reasons I was so interested in said questions lay in specific poems by Coleridge—the late work ‘Limbo’, and the ‘Rime’.  Given world enough and time, I would have liked to write on every single line that Coleridge composed, so perhaps it makes more sense to consider which works I didn’t include.  ‘Kubla Khan’ was purposefully left out, because it seemed to confirm too obviously and therefore rather uninterestingly my general thesis, that verse form offers a specific means of self-reflection.  But since writing my book, I’ve come to feel that the poem’s self-evident reflexivity is more interesting than I had first thought; as a result of which, I just presented on ‘Kubla Khan’ at this year’s Coleridge conference.  ‘Dejection’ is another matter.  I know I’ll have a reckoning with it at some point.  But not yet.

4) How has completing the monograph helped to shape the ways that you teach Coleridge’s works?

A simple if rather perverse answer is that it has made me feel able to teach Coleridge’s work at all.  During my research toward the book, I made a point of not setting Coleridge for practical criticism supervisions, given that I find that teaching works best when you’re in that happy space somewhere between over-famiiarity and pig ignorance (two extremes that I know well).  I wouldn’t actively dissuade students who wanted to read Coleridge’s poetry for the long eighteenth century paper that we teach in Cambridge, but my sense was that they often instinctively preferred to read Wordsworth or Shelley or Blake, for instance, or even a poet such as Charlotte Smith—one symptom, perhaps, of my book’s general thesis?  Having finished the project at last, I’m now looking forward to discovering another Coleridge through teaching him.  Yet there’s a less paradoxical way of answering your question—although I’d want to turn it around, by saying that my teaching practice deeply informed what ended up as the book.  In my experience, poetry causes even the very bright students, with whom I’m extremely fortunate to work, more anxiety than any other literary medium.  Very often they feel that there’s a panoply of technical terms (iambs, spondees, hypercatalectics and the rest) that not only terrify, but also kill their intuitive sense of the poem.  My task is often therefore first, to allow them to experience this intuitive sense at all, whether it comes from reading aloud, or reading while walking around the room, or whatever; and secondly, to convince them that the different technical ways of explaining or scanning verse are not objective descriptions parachuted in from elsewhere, but rather a more or less exact way of describing, exploring or even defending what they already feel.  In many ways I feel my book is best thought as a response to the pedagogical challenge to talk about verse in a manner that is feeling without being impressionistic, technical without reverting to the stale contentions of prosody.

5) What new projects do you currently have under way?

I’m currently trying to write a conceptual history of rhythm from the period 1770–1880.  I want to argue that the concept as we today understand it gets invented over that historical timeframe—I’m still at the happy illusioned phase where I can make such quixotic claims!  I think that in a number of different discourses—ranging from natural science, to idealist philosophy, to speech therapy—the term comes to sudden prominence, and in doing so transforms its conceptual reach.  The term ‘rhythm’ doesn’t even appear in Johnson’s Dictionary, although he does define ‘rhythmical’, as being equivalent to harmony—a strange thought for contemporaries.  The popular scientist Herbert Spencer, meanwhile, defines it in 1880 as ‘a conflict of forces not in equilibrium’—almost the opposite of Johnson’s definition.  While it feels good to imagine a project that has a larger historical scope, and is unrestricted to a single author, much of this project aims to build on ideas within the Coleridge book.  More concretely, I feel that the aforementioned different disciplines exist in a dialectical relationship with poems of the period—if they transfigure the concept of rhythm, it is in part because they inherit it from either works of poetry or from prosodic theory.  I’m presently working on a range of poets from Robert Browning to Coventry Patmore to Alice Meynell, so am moving later and later—although I’m extremely interested in how the recent rich vein of scholarship in historical poetics (a largely Victorianist phenomenon) needs to adapt in order to incorporate earlier, romantic texts.  I’m also taking up a research associateship on an interdisciplinary project entitled the Concept Lab, at CRASSH, from the coming year.  This project aims to chart conceptual architecture and change, by making use of the rapidly increasing data sets now at our disposal.  As such, it might be seen as one instance of what Franco Morretti calls distant reading—although I’m more interested in exposing the ways in which ‘close’ and ‘distant’ imply a false scale.

Chris Murray is currently a Junior Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University.  Previously, he completed a PhD at the University of Warwick, worked at the University of Bristol and taught for two years at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.  His research focuses on dialogues between British Romanticism and works and discourses in other national, historical and generic traditions.  His first monograph, Tragic Coleridge, which we discuss in the interview below, was published by Ashgate last year.

1) How did you first become interested in Coleridge’s uses of tragedy?

I’ve always been interested in Classics, and there are many allusions to ancient literature in Coleridge’s poems.  In particular, Coleridge’s discussion of the ancient tragic trilogy caught my attention.  He suggests that all Greek tragedies formed part of a trilogy whose outcome was ultimately positive.  He wrote a play according to that very model, called Zapolya, which was staged in London in 1818.  The flavour of that play is closer to The Winter’s Tale than to King Oedipus, because the idea of restoration accords with Coleridge’s sense of how tragedy should end: positively.  Then I realised that similar ideas permeate Coleridge’s works in various forms.  So, it was clear that Coleridge’s comprehension of tragedy was well-informed, critically underexplored, and also quite unusual compared to other commentators, few of whom would wager – for example – that Heracles massacring his children paves the way for a happy ending in a future installment.  That Coleridge’s sense of tragedy is so unconventional, and pervades his works from ‘Christabel’ to Biographia Literaria, made the project irresistible to a Coleridgean Classicist.

2) How did your plans for the monograph shift during the course of its composition?

At one point I was set to write about the reception of Classical tragedy across a range of Romantic authors.  I explored Byron, the Shelleys, and Thomas Moore, but felt that this diversity would pull the book towards survey, which I didn’t want.  Concerning Coleridge and tragedy specifically, several books seemed possible.  One would simply collate his various comments on Classical drama; lectures, table talk, letters, etc.  I think this would make a useful volume, and I may return to it at some point.  A potential monograph would have taken that idea further and attempted to derive a theory of tragedy from those works.  But the problem with Coleridge is that he changes his mind so greatly that you couldn’t cobble his thoughts together, and call them one theory of tragedy, without great misrepresentation.  Another book still would explore Coleridge’s tragic vision solely in relation to German theorists.  And of course, in its lowest, graduate-student incarnation, my work on Coleridge simply documented his poetic allusions to tragedy in a dutiful way.  But none of those approaches would let me investigate what really interested me: the notion that tragedy is a protean concept in a range of Coleridge’s works, occurring one moment in political journalism, next on the popular stage, and the next – in a completely different way – in a poetic fragment.

3) In your introduction, you contend that ‘the tragic is a deeply personal concept to Coleridge’.  How can understanding his particular sense of the tragic help us better understand Coleridge’s thought, life and works?

Tragedy is important within Coleridge’s attempts to reconcile the different modes of thought that appeal to him.  He hoped this effort would yield the ‘one system,’ a sort of master-philosophy.  A positive interpretation of tragedy could render pagan culture compatible with Christianity, which Coleridge suggests when he says that tragic ‘atonement’ foreshadows Christian ‘redemption’.  The tragedian, making sense of life’s turmoil, is a hierophant within this system of thought, so the tragic vision includes Coleridge’s sense of the author’s civic role.  The tragic philosophy of beneficial hardship also intimates ideological consistency between Coleridge as a supporter of Robespierre’s Terrors, Coleridge whose Mariner is tormented, and the Coleridge who discusses his own swollen testicle with an air of martyrdom, the self-anointed sacrificial goat.

To consider the broad importance of an artistic mode such as the tragic in Coleridge’s thought – to trace tragic ideas beyond his poetical works, including writing on non-literary subjects – also offers an alternative to the historicist overkill of criticism in recent decades.  We’re used to looking for a hidden revolutionary behind every daffodil, and it’s become somewhat unfashionable to suggest that Romantic authors were interested in literature per se.  But we can reverse that historicist perspective and study the ways in which, for example, even when Coleridge lectures on the war, or on politics, his rhetoric draws on ideas from tragedy.  These are not merely decorative allusions to literature: Coleridge’s hopes for a positive outcome to hardship originate in his reading of tragedy as wisdom literature that offers real-life lessons.

4) You write that ‘Coleridge invents tragedy for himself, using materials from various literary and philosophical traditions​’. What are the principal influences you trace in his tragically-inflected works and ruminations, and how do you see Coleridge in turn influencing later tragic theorists?

In addition to the big three of Greek tragedy – Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides – the main influences include Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and contemporary German authors such as Schiller and the Schlegels.  Coleridge also attended the theatre quite frequently in some periods, and his staged plays are marked by the uses and abuses of tragedy he saw in popular entertainment.

Unfortunately, tragic theorists have tended to overlook Coleridge because he didn’t formulate a unified theory.  And since tragedy is a protean presence in Coleridge’s oeuvre, to identify the influence of his tragic vision is pretty much to recount the afterlives of his various works, which are quite familiar to commentators.  Prominent examples include Coleridge’s psychological interpretation of Hamlet’s paralysed character, which has been massively influential on great critics including AC Bradley, and remains the dominant interpretation of the character today; also the tragically inflected balladry of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’.

The most obvious and accomplished inheritor of Coleridge’s reinventions of tragedy is W.B. Yeats; in his diary, Yeats is a wonderful reader of Coleridge’s tragic persona, which is derived from the Greek prophet Tiresias.  Yeats is not only greatly influenced by Coleridge as a poet, and as someone who reinvents tragedy in his own way, but in conceiving his role within society as commentator and adviser on civic affairs he looks back to Coleridge as journalist and religious writer.  Yeats – the Irish Senator – would be the success story in that tradition.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

My new, major project examines the place of Classics in Romantic conceptions of China.  For example, a forthcoming essay looks at the transposition of ideas between de Quincey’s belligerent Opium Wars journalism and his contemporaneous ‘Theory of Greek Tragedy’.  The more closely we look at that exchange, the less literally de Quincey appears to endorse bloodshed in China, because his conception of war is so heavily reliant on ideas of symbolic violence taken from tragedy.

I’m also nearly finished a narrative non-fiction book about Zen masters I met in Asia.  They have amazing stories, fascinating practices, and there’s a degree of overlap with the Asian philosophies that I work with in my academic project.  It’s a weird and wonderful adventure that will doubtless secure my reputation as a mad Orientalist.

Laura Kirkley is currently a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University.  She completed her PhD at Trinity Hall in Cambridge, writing an interdisciplinary thesis focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft; subsequently, she worked as a College Lecturer at The Queen’s College Oxford before returning to Trinity Hall as a Lecturer in English and French.  Her work focuses particularly on women’s writing, feminist theory, cross-cultural exchanges and translation, which made her an ideal editor for Caroline of Lichtfield, a novel originally composed in French by Isabelle de Montolieu and translated into English by Thomas Holcroft.  Her edition, which we discuss below, was published by Pickering & Chatto in April as the nineteenth volume in the Chawton House Library series.

1) You write in your acknowledgements that you first came across Caroline of Lichtfield through Mary Wollstonecraft.  To what extent were the expectations Wollstonecraft raised satisfied when you first read the novel?

I didn’t have any particular expectations, I was simply intrigued.  From what I could gather, Caroline de Lichtfield – Wollstonecraft seems to have read the French version – was a sentimental novel, and Wollstonecraft’s reviews of such works were generally waspish and disapproving, so I was surprised by her enthusiasm.  She seems to have found the novel in the library of the Kingsborough family home when she was a governess in Ireland, and I was interested in her French literary influences in that period, so I decided to find out why she’d been so delighted with Caroline.  I wondered if there had been an English translation, and I found a particularly lively one by none other than Thomas Holcroft.  I know translation is often regarded as hack-work, but I was still surprised: I’d tended to associate Holcroft with political, polemical, or theatrical works – and indeed, Caroline turns out to be the only novel he ever translated.  So I read Caroline (in French and in English) as part of my research into Wollstonecraft and her fellow radicals, and I found, both times, that I couldn’t put it down!  It’s a sentimental novel, but it’s one that engages intelligently, and often humorously, with the literature and culture of sensibility.  Montolieu is very aware of the conventions of her own genre, and she embraces and mocks them in equal measure.  I kept thinking of Austen – who, it turns out, read and enjoyed Caroline – and I’m convinced her reading of Montolieu played a part in the creation of Sense and Sensibility. Caroline is a very enjoyable read, which explains why it was a bestseller, but it’s clear to me that Montolieu was also highly influential.

2) In what ways do you believe that the novel and Montolieu’s wider work have been misrepresented in critical accounts?

Very little has been written about Montolieu.  That might sound odd, given that she was both prolific and well received; but because she often translated or adapted existing texts, she’s been sidelined as an imitative, populist writer.  Personally, I think her neglect is a feminist issue too: there’s been a tendency, in the past, to regard women writers as less inventive than their male counterparts.  Look at Aphra Behn: her works were criticised as derivative for years, even though highly respected contemporaries, such as Dryden, also adapted source texts.  Feminist critics have rehabilitated many neglected women writers, but there’s still more work to do.  Of course, our understanding of writers like Montolieu is now also being shaped by advances in Translation Studies, which suggest that translation and adaptation should, indeed, be regarded as creative practices.  To my knowledge, with the exception of Joan Hinde Stewart, critics have tended to dismiss Caroline as sentimental melodrama.  And yet exacting critics of the novel, such as Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Staël, and Maria Edgeworth, singled out Montolieu for praise.  I think they were alert to her metafictional commentary and the moral argument of her works in a way that many modern critics are not.  Hopefully my introduction to the edition will do something to address that problem!

3) How did the text’s status as a translation and its Swiss and European contexts affect the preparation of your edition?

I wanted to highlight the differences between Montolieu’s text and Holcroft’s translation, so I spent a lot of time comparing the versions and creating a set of footnotes that point out, and suggest possible reasons for, important cuts, additions, or alterations.  In the introduction, I also devoted a lot of space to contextualising Montolieu, who was a Swiss-French gentlewoman, and Holcroft, who was a working-class British radical.  That brief description makes them sound poles apart, but I believe that Caroline testifies to certain shared moral and cultural values that promoted literary exchange between Britain and Switzerland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

4) In what ways do you think the novel might productively be used in undergraduate and postgraduate courses and by researchers?

Caroline epitomises the French novel of sentiment, so it would be invaluable reading for students of French and Comparative Literature.  The English version was incredibly well received in Britain, so Holcroft’s translation could also be used to explore ideas of sensibility and moral sentiment with students of English literature.  The novel was written at a pivotal moment, when the literature of sensibility was enjoying its heyday on the European continent but was also a well-established genre increasingly vulnerable to ridicule.  Montolieu provides material to explore both kinds of response to sentimental literature.  Researchers of any novelist writing in this period – particularly scholars of Austen, Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth or De Staël – may also want to consider the influence of Caroline on the novel in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  It’s also essential reading, I believe, for scholars of Holcroft.  As my introduction suggests, it’s instructive to observe what aspects of the novel he changed in the process of translation.  In my view, his translations were often apprentice efforts – he used them to develop various styles of writing and, in Caroline of Lichtfield, his prose is distinctively theatrical.  I hope the novel also provokes more interest in the works of Montolieu, who has been neglected for far too long.

5) What new projects are you currently pursuing?

Too many!  I’m currently finishing the Wollstonecraft monograph that I was researching when I came across Caroline de Lichtfield.  It’s called The Revolutionary Cosmopolitanism of Mary Wollstonecraft, and it redefines Wollstonecraft as a cosmopolitan intellectual who was profoundly influenced by the European commerce des lumières and by Revolutionary political and linguistic theories.  I analyse her engagement with the works of Rousseau, her work as a translator, and her evolving philosophical and creative response to issues of patriotism, cosmopolitanism, and cultural difference.  I’ve also been researching Wollstonecraft’s translation into French and German in her own lifetime and in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and considering how the different agendas of the translators gave her multiple European ‘afterlives’.  I’m interested in attitudes to translation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and that’s also led to some research into Germaine de Staël, the quintessential cosmopolitan.  And finally, I’ve begun work, with some colleagues at Cambridge and St Andrews, on a project that explores the literary and aesthetic treatment of maternal sentiments in the early modern era.  My research for that project has focussed partly on Wollstonecraft – again! – but I’ve also been considering the lyric and elegiac poetry of women writing earlier in the eighteenth century.

Ildiko Csengei is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Huddersfield.  After completing her doctorate at the University of Cambridge, she held an R. A. Butler Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.  Before taking up her current post, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of English at Cambridge and Director of Studies in English at Newnham College.  Her research focuses on the literature and culture of sensibility, Romanticism and war, the history of emotions and the intersections between science, literature and history.  Below, we discuss her wide-ranging and fascinating first monograph, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012.

1) Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century focuses particularly on ‘the darker side of sympathy’, examining its ‘morally and politically charged ambivalence’.  How did you first become interested in this area?

During my very first term as a PhD student I came across Albrecht von Haller’s A Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals in Cambridge University Library’s Rare Books Room.  This text drew my attention to an interesting ambivalence in the very definition of eighteenth-century sensibility.  Albrecht von Haller was a Swiss physiologist, who examined sensibility in various parts of the body in 1752 by dissecting live animals.  In this treatise he depicts the acute torments he put his animals through for the benefit of mankind, while claiming to feel for them the strongest compassion.  Haller defined sensibility as a capacity for feeling pain, and he therefore tried to determine the sensibility of various organs through the animal’s “evident signs of suffering”, such as their cries and squirms.  What I found really intriguing, however, is how the text itself bears the marks of his author’s ambivalent position.  Haller’s method of definition, based on the foreclosure of emotion, creates a traumatic text that is structured by symptomatic fissures.  Despite its erasure in the process of experimentation, however, affect re-emerges in the tropes of the medical text.  From then on I proposed to formulate my main research questions around how sensibility and its definition could become inseparable from violence and cruelty and pursued these questions at the intersections of ethics, science, literature and politics.

2) How did the book evolve as it traversed its road to publication?

I always wanted my PhD dissertation to become a book one day, so I wrote it with an ambitious scope in mind.  Driven by a passion for the sciences of the psyche, I worked with a theoretical framework that puts the age of sensibility into a broader history of feeling and explores connections with more recent ideas of emotional response in psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and the neurosciences.  Yet, when the dissertation was finished I thought of it as a skeleton that needed to be fleshed out, and therefore the biggest transformation the project went through was from PhD dissertation to book manuscript.  This involved a large volume of added historical, philosophical, psychological and political material, a rearrangement of the structure and the refinement of the argument.  As the project evolved I realised that an important aspect of my argument is to shift the focus of scholarship to highlight the vicissitudes of mechanist and materialist veins of thought that persist on the margins of a predominantly vitalist culture of sensibility throughout the eighteenth century.  These often overlooked trends are important, because they open up a space for socio-political critique and for resistance to violence and to dominant structures of power.  Once I had submitted the manuscript to Palgrave Macmillan, I was lucky to have had a straightforward route to publication.  The editors were always prompt, helpful and professional and they showed great enthusiasm for the project from start to completion.  Working with them was a pleasure.

3) The book falls into two halves, one examining the philosophical and bodily aspects of sympathetic response, the other focusing particularly on literary texts, including both popular published works and private manuscripts.  Why did you select this particular structure, and how did you come to choose your major case studies?

The structure of the book follows the ways in which discourses and concepts that constitute the language and culture of sensibility emerged from the fields of physiology and philosophy and gradually permeated literature, politics, and also everyday speech, life and manners.  This structure also enabled me to fully outline and develop the book’s broader theoretical framework and to explain my approach to sympathy in the first half of the book.  When organising the material I took a thematic approach and explored forms of emotional and physical response to stimulus, including sympathy, tears, swooning and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century contexts.

Before I settled on my chosen case studies I had read through a vast number of primary texts based on my thematic searches in the library catalogue.  I wanted to understand the boundaries, extremes and margins of sensibility: fainting and loss of consciousness, moments when feeling turns into insensibility, when sentiment borders on madness and hysteria, when sympathy fails and when sensibility is just another name for the pains of torture.  The concept of irritability, denoting the body’s involuntary contractions, is sensibility’s materialist “other”; however, it was not only important for eighteenth-century physiologists, but also for the language of political writings and for the swoons of eighteenth-century sentimental heroines.  I was intrigued by the novels of Oliver Goldsmith and Henry Mackenzie, where excessive sympathy and generosity endangers the very integrity of the self.  In the course of my research I came across a few real gems, for instance, La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine, Henry Mackenzie’s letters and Godwin’s diary.  Close reading a few helped me form my initial research questions and presuppositions.  In the end I included core literary texts of sensibility (by Sarah Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry Mackenzie), works by its most central philosophers (Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith), medical writings about sympathy, sensibility and irritability (Albrecht von Haller, Robert Whytt, La Mettrie), late eighteenth-century critiques of sensibility by Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Inchbald, along with William Godwin’s papers, letters and diary.

4) How has the process of writing this book changed the way you approach eighteenth-century literature, both in your research and in the classroom?

Apart from understanding the contextual specificities of eighteenth-century sensibility, this book made me think about the continuities of eighteenth-century cultural phenomena with modern sciences of the mind.  Two ways of questioning operated in my book: whilst performing contextualised readings of individual texts, the book argued for the necessity of establishing relations between eighteenth-century and modern ways of understanding feelings and the human mind.  When it comes to affectivity I found that a strictly contextual understanding was not always sufficient for explaining the workings of feelings and their ambivalence.  I argued that the typical symptoms of sensibility such as fainting, crying and melancholia form part of a complex psychopathology that often reaches beyond the concerns of contemporary medicine.  I came to see the age of sensibility as part of a long history of feeling, where connections and continuities can be found in the ways in which feelings have been experienced, expressed, conceptualised and studied from the eighteenth century to the present.  In this respect, the history of sympathy is closely interrelated with the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, creating a framework in which the age of sensibility and that of Freud and his successors are theoretically and historically linked.

But also, the book made me think about the relevance of eighteenth-century sensibility to our current practices of reading and emotional response.  The success of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling at the time of its publication in 1771 and the subsequent ridicule of its tearful scenes only a few decades later well illustrates the transformation of the way in which audiences related to sentiment.  We do not cry over sentimental novels any more.  Instead, we produce scholarly analyses from a safely detached perspective.  Today’s dominant academic practices cut themselves off from direct affective engagement.  Both formalist and historical approaches to literature tend to facilitate detachment, and the experience of emotional response is thus excluded from serious academic discussion.  Reconciling the obvious tension between critical, historical detachment and the immediacy of emotional response is the challenge students of literature today need to face.  In our age, texts exist that – as sentimental novels once did – compel us to absorb the values and ideologies of a culture by directly appealing to our tears or our feelings.  A detachment from our own feelings (whether conscious of involuntary) does not help us to evaluate critically the cultural and political messages that surround us, but nor does an unreflected, purely sentimental response prove helpful.  Making us conscious that our emotional responses do exist is a task that needs to be addressed by future practices of critical reading, which need to negotiate a space for the experience of affectivity within the framework of its theory.  This does not mean returning to a purely affective reading practice, but the acknowledgment of our emotional responses and a simultaneous preservation of our critical and historical insight.

5) What projects are you currently working on?

I am now writing a new academic monograph, War and Feeling in British Romanticism.  I am focusing on the role feelings and emotions play in the process of experiencing, understanding, and representing conflict during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.  A number of articles are also in preparation on specific battles and contemporary technologies of warfare.  I have found that my long-standing interest in the history of emotions comes in handy with this project too.