Beyond Sense and Sensibility

Peggy Thompson is Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College.

The nine essays published here are presented as a Festschrift for the great bibliographer and Smollett scholar O. M. Brack . . . The essays themselves range widely in subject: Adam Rounce explores James Boswell’s distancing of himself from the less sentimental Dr. Johnson, who (as Mrs. Thrase said) always 'hated a feeler'; Heather King traces Frances Burney’s persistent argument that the same 'sensibility' that makes female suffering morally educative to men takes a terrible toll on women themselves. Perhaps the best essays in the collection come in the last section, 'Reframing the Question': the editor’s own discussion of Johnson’s fear of nonrational 'habit' and James Noggle on the curious fondness during the 'age of sensibility' for the word insensibly (most of all in Gibbon) . . . Every essay in it [the collection] is clear, thoughtful, interesting, and informative. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.

• List of IllustrationsForeword: In Memoriam O M Brack, Jr. (1938-2012)Timothy ErwinAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I Revisiting SensibilityChapter One: Boswell and the Limits of SensibilityAdam RounceChapter Two: “Beshrew the sombre pencil!”: Robert Fergusson and Sensibility in ScotlandRhona BrownChapter Three: Pictures of Women in Frances Burney’s Cecilia and Camilla: How Cecilia Looks and What Camilla SeesHeather KingPart II Rethinking DidacticismChapter Four: Artful Instruction: Philip Doddridge’s Life of Colonel James GardinerChristopher D. JohnsonChapter Five: Two Singularly Moral Works: Fenelon’s The Adventure of Telemachus and Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry ClinkerLeslie A. ChiltonChapter Six: The Politically Engaged Child: Charlotte Smith’s Children’s Literature and the Discourse of SensibilityAdrianne WadewitzPart III Reframing the QuestionsChapter Seven: Habit and Reason in Samuel Johnson’s RamblerPeggy ThompsonChapter Eight: Unfelt AffectJames NoggleChapter Nine: Seeing into the Life of Things: Re-Viewing Early Wordsworth through Object-Oriented PhilosophyEvan GottliebWorks CitedIndexAbout the Contributors