This essay traces the study of the vexed topic of sentimentalism in long nineteenth-century American critical discourse. Over the past decades, scholars have drawn upon different disciplines and critical theories to reframe the expansive and subtle complexities of sentimentalism’s influence as mode and ideology; these investigations, under the capacious term “feeling,” sometimes dovetail with, and other times are disaggregated from, inquiries into sympathy, affect studies, the sensorium, and the history of emotions. Although the turn to affect has been seen as a way out of political overdetermination, concerns about liberatory potential and structural collusions were prefigured and informed by debates about sentimentality’s ethical bind. This essay turns to negative terms, glossing the use of “unfeeling” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then appearances of “unfeeling” and “unsympathetic” in illustrative scholarship over the last three decades for their operations and implications. The chapter then teases out the cultural politics of unfeeling from a queer, feminist of color perspective: What if one reconsiders unfeeling from the vantage point of those marginalized and not simply as hegemonic imposition? The discussion closes with Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša, reassessing the Indigenous activist’s wish, in her own words, to become “unfeeling stone.”

Chapter 2 contests deeply entrenched assumptions about pastoral, arguing that the Eclogues do not evince nostalgia for a lost, idealized nature but nonetheless are deeply concerned with the nonhuman environment. The chapter shows that the local places so central to the Eclogues are networks and assemblages of human and nonhuman beings, and that the local dwelling valorized by the collection is dwelling as a part of a more-than-human community. The poetry figures this ecological dwelling through the trope of pastoral sympathy and through its focus on environmental sound. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Vergilian pastoral is best understood not as a representation of herdsmen’s songs but of entire bucolic soundscapes. The second part of the chapter considers the implications of this more-than-human acoustic world for our understanding of Vergil’s own poetry. It argues that nonhuman sound contributes to the sonic texture of Vergil’s language, identifying an acoustic ecopoetics in the Eclogues as Vergil manipulates his language to transmit and recreate nonhuman sound.

As well as providing a brief biography of Sophie de Grouchy, the introduction sets out the aims of the book. It describes how A Republic of Sympathy is the tale of how thought could be produced by an eighteenth-century woman in a time of Revolution: with all the possibilities, limitations, and opportunities that this period offered. It outlines how over this period, Grouchy developed her own, unique form of republicanism, by appealing to sympathy as the glue between the individual and the republic. It emphasises that Grouchy’s thought consisted of a series of shifting, adapting ideas, which nevertheless consistently relied on this sentiment. It describes how Grouchy not only experiment with variations of her theory over this period, but with different mediums of expressing her ideas: including pedagogical treatise, journal articles, translated texts, commentaries, collaborative projects, or embodied in her lived relationships. It also highlights Grouchy’s key interlocutors: from Adam Smith, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from her husband, the marquis de Condorcet to Benjamin Constant, from Thomas Paine to Jacques Pierre Brissot.

Chapter 1 focuses on the first draft of Grouchy’s Lettres on Sympathy, the only text to be published under her name in her lifetime. In contrast to commonly received historical wisdom, it argues that Grouchy did not, in fact, begin writing this treatise between 1791 and 1793. Rather, it suggests that it was first composed around 1786, in response to an Académie française competition to produce the best elementary moral treatise on the duties of the man and the citizen. It goes on to reconstruct the contents of the original text. Her aim, in this first draft, was non-political: she wanted to demonstrate how individuals, rather than regurgitating a catechism, could learn to discern moral truths for themselves through a reasoned reflection on the sentiment of sympathy. She predominantly engaged with the ideas found in the moral, pedagogical, and epistemological works of Rousseau, Smith, and Locke. Despite the circumstances of its eventual publication as an accompaniment to her translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, it is argued that Grouchy demonstrated significant disagreements with Smith, and instead hewed closely to the ideas of Rousseau.

The late seventeenth century saw the creation of a new affective category, ‘tender passions’ or ‘sentiments’, by female writers such as Madeleine de Scudéry in the salons of Louis XIV’s France. From here into the eighteenth century, sentiments were developed through airs, novels and drama. Contrary to prevalent images of eighteenth-century communicative clarity, sentiments were more socially complex and less easily legible than the ‘passions’ of the Baroque. Their expression on stage required a new realistic dramaturgy, building on the flexible use of ensemble, gesture and mime in comic opera. A characteristically sentimental conception of the dramatic ‘tableau’ resulted. Theorized by Diderot and Rousseau in the 1750s, tableaux aimed to evoke and sustain ‘tender’ sentiments of pity, affection and social solidarity through dramatically heightened moments in the action. These relied on a more spellbinding theatrical illusion, intended to absorb the audience within its all-engrossing atmosphere, and to which music contributed by supporting and highlighting gestures over rhetorical set pieces.

This chapter investigates how Australian women poets mobilised Romantic sensibility and the figure of the poetess to navigate the complex dynamic between liminality and voice. It proposes a transnational extension of a female Romantic tradition to advocate for the rights of those disempowered in colonial and patriarchal structures. The chapter explores how writers like Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, and Caroline Leakey linked themes of exile and transportation with Romantic tropes such as the ‘fallen woman.’ It demonstrates how their poetry reveals an emotional range that extends the domestic affections into expressions of anger and distress at injustices. It also considers how religion informed their responses to regimes of regulation. The chapter also analyses Ada Cambridge’s critique of marriage in the suppressed volume Unspoken Thoughts, as well as her amplification of a broader gendering of harm and shame.

Critics have long argued over Beatrice Cenci’s guilt and moral responsibility in relation to her murder of her father and rapist, as Shelley himself anticipated they would. Far less attention has been paid, however, to Count Cenci’s program for corrupting his daughter and turning her, at least in part, into a mirror version of himself. Count Cenci engineers a perverse kind of empathic identification, one that Shelley calls, in Prometheus Unbound, “loathsome sympathy.” This chapter presents “loathsome” sympathy in turn as an extreme or inverted form of the sympathy that plays so crucial a role in Shelley’s poetic and ethical theories, theories he develops from passages in various eighteenth-century moral philosophers including Hume, Rousseau, Burke, and Adam Smith. Twenty-first-century research on empathy and “mirror neurons” provides a number of partial and provocative analogies with eighteenth-century sympathy theory that are used heuristically to provide a novel perspective on the tradition that leads from Hume to Shelley. The chapter looks especially at how mirror neuron research emphasizes the embodied, visual, intersubjective, and unconscious workings of empathy. Shelley, the chapter argues, develops a comparable sense of sympathy, one that, in its “perverse” version, informs The Cenci.

Abundant moments of indecision and delay shape George Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda (1876), which treats uncertainty as a recursive movement between interior and exterior, potentiality and activity. This chapter shows how Eliot explores action’s convoluted antecedents, drawing on intellectual trends in mid-century comparative method and physiological psychology, especially the latter’s portrait of embodied willing and pathologies of volition. These contexts frame a reading of the novel’s twin stances of practical experience and intellectual reflection: hesitation, the bewildering experience of having a “will which is and yet is not yet,” and its rational cousin, comparison, “our precious guide.” Formal fluctuations and portrayals of mental caprice would seem at cross-purposes with Eliot’s narrative control and moral coherence. Yet in discovering a “kinship” between certainty and doubt, she reinvigorates her novelistic ethics and recasts sympathy as guaranteed by “closer comparison between the knowledge which we call rational & the experience which we call emotional.” Her characters set store by irresolute stances of hesitation and comparison, and predictive affects like trust and hope.

Until quite recently, international relations theory neglected the role of emotions. This chapter surveys the rehabilitation of emotions and moral sentiment in political and international relations theory with a view to examining the cultivation of sympathy as a normative and historical condition of international humanitarian law as a ‘civilising process’. The chapter argues that, as part of a broader ‘civilising process’ to alleviate unnecessary human suffering, moral sentiment has been an indispensable, if ambivalent, factor in the historical pursuit of humanitarian action. The chapter argues that the modern codification of international humanitarian law is predicated on the cultivation of moral sentiments such as sympathy and compassion being extended to those injured or killed on the battlefields.

Chapter 4 moves to the medical texts of the imperial age, addressing first the theoretical approaches, under the subdivisions ‘localization’, semiotics, chronology and aetiology. The time frame involved here is the first to sixth centuries CE, with the main focus on Aretaeus and Galen. The two famous physicians offered strong accounts of phrenitis in terms of localization (with a centre towards the heart, first, and the brain, second), and also introduced sophisticated discussions about ‘sympathy’ and co-affection in the disease. They also addressed symptomatology and, in the case of Galen especially, took phrenitis as exemplary case for semiotic discussions and the exploration of causes.

Although our ultimate goal is an analysis and theory of perspective taking in literature, an important insight is that perspective taking in reading literature is subject to the same factors and constraints and may depend on the same types of processes as perspective taking in real life. In Chapter 3, we review research in social and personality psychology that is applicable to literary perspective taking and that can help us advance our understanding of how readers make sense of fictional minds. Under the general umbrella term of “mind reading,” theory of mind, theory theory, and simulation theories offer competing explanations of how individuals make sense of other minds. We argue that interpreting these ideas in terms of analogy provides the basis for a more coherent analysis. We also consider the problem of empathy and how it is related to mind reading. Our analysis is that empathy should be thought of as emotional perspective taking, and we apply our analogical inference approach here as well. Finally, we consider the neural bases of perspective taking and discuss how different brain networks may be related to the components of perspective taking by analogy.

By 1660 the number of common criminals hanged in England had fallen dramatically: but England still executed far more people than other European states. That practice was sustained in part, in the minds of England’s urbane peoples, by a time-honoured perception of crime as a moral failing akin to others, albeit of far greater social consequence. By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, however, that vision was being eroded by two cultural transformations. First, a more worldly (secular) vision bred impatience with the idea that the most lasting and certain punishment of serious crime must be left to God’s Last Judgment rather than achieved in the here and now. Such views were reinforced, secondly, by a new culture of feeling, which inspired not only distaste for the physical and emotional sufferings inflicted upon serious criminals, but also (contrarily) greater anxiety about the threat of their crimes.