Abstract

This essay argues for the influence of David Hume's ideas about popular romance on his theory of sympathy. The article examines Hume's essays and his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), taking up the relationship between Hume's concept of sympathy and the affective language of literature and concluding that the imagination in contact with literature is Hume's model for his theory of the self. It argues that Hume's understanding of the role of the imagination in shaping personal identity is based on an insecure distinction between the "appetite for falshood" that characterizes female romance-readers and the appetite for truth that characterizes the philosopher.

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