Sentimental Novel - The Satirizing of Sentimentalism

The Satirizing of Sentimentalism

The novelist Henry Fielding, known later for his novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, satirized the sentimental style in his early novels Shamela and Joseph Andrews.

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility is most often seen as a "witty satire of the sentimental novel", by juxtaposing values of the Age of Enlightenment (sense, reason) with those of the later eighteenth century (sensibility, feeling) while exploring the larger realities of women's lives, especially through concerns with marriage and inheritance. This reading of Sense and Sensibility specifically and Austen's fiction in general has been complicated and revised by recent critics such as Claudia L. Johnson (Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel and Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s ), Jillian Heydt-Stevenson (Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions, and Christopher C. Nagle (Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era ), all of whom see unruly and even subversive energies at play in her work, inspired by the sentimental tradition.