Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

What makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of the benevolent, compassionate ideology of eighteenth-century sensibility? This book explores forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swoons and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century literary, philosophical and scientific texts.