The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture by Paul Goring (review)

162 gernon Sidney, and John Locke, we will observe the emergence of distinctively liberal and republican modes of thought and discourse.’’ For the most part, it succeeds wonderfully. Mr. Ward’s simple but profound contribution to the debate shows that the liberal and republican interpretations present a false dichotomy—they both can be true. The intellectual forces that shaped the Exclusion Crisis and Glorious Revolution drew strength from the principles of natural liberty and individual rights as well as from the principles of civic virtue and political participation . The Whig political discourse of the period emphasized the value of liberty as well as the importance of virtue, which means that it is overly simplistic and schematic to reduce the whole conversation to a single paradigm. Mr. Ward does an excellent job of recreating the intellectual milieu of the Exclusion Crisis by revivifying the major alternative political philosophies, many of which are virtually unknown today, that formed the horizon of the early modern debate over sovereignty. The only pervasive problem in the work is that in trying to recreate this intellectual world, Mr. Ward sometimes finds his material slipping away from him. He shows that the liberal and republican traditions in Anglo-American thought were originally part of a single discourse of opposition against divine right absolutism, yet the differences between these traditions are often as glaring as their shared rejection of absolutism . Mr. Ward himself seems to feel the problem. He says that he has tried to ‘‘reconcile the different strands of this early modern philosophy into the complex heterogeneous whole it originally was.’’ But in what sense are the parts ‘‘reconciled’’ when the whole remains complexly ‘‘heterogeneous.’’ Matthew Simpson PAUL GORING. The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2005. Pp. 222. $50; $22.50 (paper). Aaron Hill’s The Art of Acting argues that actors summon up bodily signs in performance; a grammar of gestures manifests specific, identifiable ‘‘passions .’’ For Mr. Goring, power sharing and capitalism created a need in the middle class for the means of gentility, and orators revealed a model of politeness through physical movement and eloquence in public and in conduct books. British culture saw the human body as objectively performing ‘‘eloquent’’ movement and gestures in public; thus the body responds to cultural developments . The body in place and in motion is the site on which permutations of British ‘‘polite society’’ were displayed, recognized, and valued. While stage speech in the eighteenth century has been studied extensively, the body as a medium for public oratory and its attendant gestures has not. Mr. Goring distinguishes between polite bodily discourse and that of enthusiastic bodies, such as those ‘‘associated with Methodism,’’ especially the exuberant preaching of John Henley, who challenged religious propriety. Thomas Sheridan believed systematically ‘‘fixing ’’ British oratory and bodily performance would make English speech more natural than the ornamented French oratory , and these improvements would lend cultural coherence to the English nation. Bodily eloquence also appears in the sentimental novel and language of feeling. Readers ‘‘stage’’ politeness by 163 learning and sharing with others. Works by Richardson—particularly Pamela— Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, and Henry Mackenzie constitute a genre of sentimental fiction featuring performance . Mr. Goring’s Epilogue examines Sterne’s oratory and bodily expression in sermons and literature. In sermonizing , Sterne’s indecorous wit and bawdiness did not exhibit appropriate gravitas, but in Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey he gently mocks scholars who produced technical formulae for public oration and somatic delivery: Corporal Trim’s now-famous reading of Sterne’s own sermon. Rebecca Shapiro Westminster College LYNN FESTA. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2006. Pp. 312. $55. Recently, I overheard a renowned eighteenth-century scholar opine, ‘‘Aren’t we through with sensibility yet?’’ For some, it has been a long twenty years in which studies of sentiment have come of age and matured. By refusing to accept sentimentality on its own terms, however, Ms. Festa discovers some new dimensions to explore. She stakes the originality of this book on her insights into the concept of the person, but I find that the project is most memorable for unearthing the volatile politics of...