Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (review)

In her introduction, Lynn Festa poses a simple yet compelling question for eighteenth-century studies: why did sentimentalism become the dominant mode for writing about colonialism and slavery in the age of European global expansion? How did the “turning inward” of the sentimental mode relate to the “turning outward” of empire (2)? The answer, she contends, requires us to look beyond established critical discussions of sentiment, or the literature of empire, or even beyond their convergence, in order to give fresh consideration to the central role of material culture—the world of goods and objects, or of things, to use more recent parlance—in the dynamics of sympathetic exchange. Festa’s most striking innovation (and there are many in this richly topical study) is to insist that sentimentalism is a literary mode that is as deeply concerned with objects as with subjects. In this sense, her project takes its cue from, and significantly extends, current scholarship on so-called “it-narratives,” an eighteenth-century fictional subgenre that attributes voice and thence a kind of agency to objects and commodities. And this trajectory of literary enquiry, in turn, owes a great deal to recent historiography of the demand-side of the eighteenth-century marketplace—of the consumer revolution, if you will—which was largely driven by the products and profits of empire, as explored by John Brewer, Ann Bermingham, Colin Campbell, and others.

Festa’s comparative frame—loosely encompassing French and British sentimental literature of the second half of the century—marshals the writing of Adam Smith, David Hume, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on sympathy, along with Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative, to construct the core of an argument that ranges over a remarkably broad selection of cultural objects from abolitionist poetry (William Cowper, Thomas Day, Anna Laetitia Barbauld), visual culture (Josiah Wedgwood, the plan of the slave ship Brookes), and parliamentary debate, to travel writing (Janet Schaw’s Journal of the Voyage to the West Indies) and polemical prose (Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes). And while this spread is far from representative with regard to French or British sentimentalisms per se, it is amply justified as a reflection of the modes of sentimental discourse generated in the context of the Atlantic triangle (between Britain and France, Africa, and the Caribbean), and of the tropes of slavery that constitute Festa’s key objects of analysis.

The book’s significance, however, is less in its themes and scope than in the quality and originality of its argument, which recasts conventional thinking about sentimentalism. Festa’s approach is not simply—in the mode of Marxian analysis as well as of many others (Hannah Arendt springs to mind)—an attack on sentimentalism’s affective regime; nor does she claim, like Richard Rorty or Martha Nussbaum, that sentimentalism, as a vehicle for the sympathetic imagination, supports the liberal polity. Instead, Festa unsettles received understandings about sentimentalism’s origins and functions with two bold and important claims. First, she asserts that the eighteenth-century cult of sentiment is less an episode in the history of individualism than a moment in the history of colonial expansion (3): “in exposing the discrepancy between Enlightenment ideals and the realities of human suffering and exploitation, empire begets sentimentality” (7). By granting empire anterior status, Festa can unplug sentimentalism from the nation-bound and individual-orientated narratives to which it has belonged so as to consider its function not as a technology of self, or as a correlative of liberalism, but as a literary mode that makes the “great world without” (1) comprehensible to the metropolis. As she puts it, sentimentality “fashions the tropes that render relations with distant others thinkable” (8), shrinking distances between metropolitan readers and colonial adventurers, slaves, and native populations.

Second, in an argument that draws on structuralism, Festa makes the case that sentimentalism is not most effectively regarded as...