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  • Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction by Alex Wetmore
  • Darren N. Wagner (bio)
Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction by Alex Wetmore New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. x+ 208pp. US $90; £50. ISBN 978-1137346339.

Men of Feeling is about five sentimental novels published within a twelve-year span: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1766–70), Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). Each of these books centres on male characters of fine sensibility, but these texts have a great deal more in common than an abundance of delicate men prone to moments of sympathy, reflection, and lachrymosity. Alex Wetmore lucidly describes how each book features a particular self-referential literary technique that reflects the philosophies, concerns, and realities of a period recognized as the culture of sensibility’s apogee. The technique used in these novels casts physical bodies and material things into relief. This self-referential manoeuvre works by disrupting conventional literary forms and drawing the reader’s attention to the materiality of the book being read. Wetmore calls this literary technique “corporeal defamiliarization.”

A cumbersome but useful expression, corporeal defamiliarization is a valuable entry point for understanding sentimental literature and accessing that genre’s engagement with eighteenth-century readers and society at large. This literary feature—adapted from Scriblerian traditions—links several major themes in mid- and late eighteenth-century Britain: the [End Page 204] physiology of sensibility and Scottish enlightenment moral philosophy; medical fashions and print culture; public science and perspectives on gender. Towards these first paired themes, close readings of David Hartley, Lord Kames, and Adam Smith offer a tidy account of the moral philosophical bearing of sentimentalism. As Wetmore announces, corporeal defamiliarization is the “more fleshly species of self-consciousness” in sensibility literature that “is ultimately mobilized in the service of the moral, aesthetic and ideological aims of sentimentalism” (2). Rooting his literary history in the Scottish Enlightenment is a well-considered step in Wetmore’s orderly chronology, one I especially appreciate for how precisely it defines the sentimental genre.

The third chapter, “Feeling/Machine,” shows how sensibility figured in exchanges between sentimental individuals and mechanical objects like automata in such public places as Cox’s Museum in Spring Gardens, London. Philosophical discussions of civic humanism are used to explain the unusual connection between men of feeling and unfeeling machines. Wetmore elaborates on how automata seemingly transgressed boundaries of inanimate and animate, labour and art, liberalism and mechanism. He further reveals how printing mechanics and print culture informed ideas about sensible bodies as “unconscious machines” and sentimental sympathy as benevolence (88). There are, however, moments when I am uncertain about Wetmore’s interpretation of “mechanic.” Some etiological background would be helpful here, especially as meanings of mechanical terms were manifold and changing throughout the century.

A medical emphasis on the body’s nerves runs parallel with these philosophical aims and mechanical themes of sentimentalism. Theories and diagnoses by the likes of Thomas Willis, George Cheyne, Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller, and Herman Boerhaave are shown manifest in the lives and writings of Sterne, Samuel Richardson, and David Hume. Wetmore highlights “the genre’s palliative concern with refining, attuning and strengthening nervous sensibilities” (103), but he rightly paints a more complicated picture of the relationship between sentimental literature and the rise of physiognomy and spa towns, as these medical developments are both pursued and criticized in these novels. While Men of Feeling is generally, and admirably, flush with analysis of literary scholarship, it is sometimes thin on references to the eighteenth-century medicine and science historiography. This shortcoming is evident in the reliance on Roy Porter’s now-dated discussion of quackery, which has since been revised by studies on medical identities and marketplaces.

Wetmore examines men writing sentimental novels, their male fictional characters, and some later writings by women (Mary Wollstone-craft, Hannah More, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Hamilton), yet little is said explicitly about masculinity and femininity in relation to [End Page 205] sexuality. When gender is directly addressed—as when discussing the inversions...

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