Rakes, Wives and Merchants: Shifts from the Satirical to the Sentimental

Bourgeois Rakes in Wedding Crashers: Feudal to Neo‐Liberal Articulations in Modern Comedic Discourse

“…One answer is the man of sentiment, a vital ingredient in the development of the bourgeois rake. The surge in fashionable displays of sentimentality is a well‐known cultural phenomenon of the eighteenth century in England (Combe). For his part in this movement, the comedic man of sentiment represents everything that the satirical and egoistic aristocratic rake is not.…”