The Art of Knowing Your Own Nothingness

Anchored in a reading of Jane Austen's Persuasion, this essay proposes three main claims. The first treats Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments as narrative theory and argues for its important and under-recognized influence on the development of nineteenth-century realism. The second posits a relationship between Smith's model of sympathy and nineteenth-century literary realism, offering a new term--sympathetic realism--to account for that realism's formal structure. The third argues that Persuasion demonstrates Austen's determination to wed Smithian theory to the novel form, primarily through exemplification and the strategy of making cases, labor performed by both the novel's heroine and its form.