Sensibility as Epistemology in Caleb Williams, Waverley, and Frankenstein

This essay argues that Caleb Williams (1794) by William Godwin, Waverley (1814) by Walter Scott, and Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley should be read as end-of-sensibility novels in which the ethical-epistemological model of sensibility is shown to have become insufficient as an account of the human mind, yet at the same time acts as a ferment for a new representation of the psyche and of man as a social being. It analyzes the problematization of sympathy in those novels, and suggests that, through the disintegration of the paradigm of sensibility, they adumbrate the dynamics and thematics of the Bildungsroman.