Sensibility and Economics in the Novel

Skinner, Gillian

doi:10.1057/9780230372566

Cited by 21 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…The eighteenth century witnessed a greater awareness of the moral responsibility of the use of wealth and the acquisition of wealth and estates that became a subject of discussion in the novel (Thompson, 1996, 2). Part of middle‐ranking families’ ethics were to do with accounting for one’s wealth as a sign of virtue (Skinner, 1999, 6–7). The development of the trade and credit economy that began in the early modern period led to a freer circulation of money in society.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Possessed by property: Inheritance in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748)

Cortese

2021

Orbis Litterarum

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The inheritance conflict in Samuel Richardson´s novel Clarissa (1747–1748) has been read as staging the clash between two different class ideologies and as an expression of the dead’s posthumous agency exerted on the living. I argue that the novel’s two wills ultimately serve to make a broader point about inheritance. I contend that Richardson´s complex treatment of the effects of each will on each member of the Harlowe family underscores the problematic nature of inheritance as a gift. I compare the novel’s two wills in light of Marcel Mauss’s work on gift‐exchange to discuss how Richardson engages with inheritance as a gift that confirms or reorganises familial hierarchies and imposes an obligation on the heir. Reading the novel in terms of the way in which inheritance places the heir in the position of caretaker that they cannot be released from until their death, offers a different reading of Clarissa’s reluctance to refer to herself as the possessor of the estate in the novel. My reading of the novel moves beyond the novel’s inheritance dispute to provide insight into the circular and problematic nature of inheritance as gift. While attention has been paid to the power that the testator or donor possesses in bequeathing their inheritance, less attention has been paid to what it means to receive such a gift.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Possessed by property: Inheritance in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748)

Cortese

2021

Orbis Litterarum

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“…Gillian Skinner draws attention to the role of the country landlord as both patriarch and benefactor in The Vicar of Wakefield and Frances Brooke's Lady Julia Mandeville (1763). 42 After the Seven Years War, then, novels and other forms of sentimental writing were keen to demonstrate the preferred role of gentlemen as in the home and withdrawn from society.…”

Section: Irish Masculinity In 'John Buncle' Vol I (1756)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The differences between John Buncle and the man-of-feeling novel noted above can thus be explained by the fact that, in Skinner's words, '[s]entimental fiction is essentially a middle-class genre which both creates an idealized aristocracy and deplores the luxury and excess associated with aristocratic vices'. 51 Of course, Buncle's proud refusal to engage in trade does not benefit him all that much; he is exposed to a degree of ignominy, as he scrambles to secure the next wife or relies on the charity of chance-met acquaintances. But Amory's narrator cannot be reduced to a cautionary representation of the shiftless gentleman: his narrative selfjustification is too insistent, his belief in the rightness of his own course too intense.…”

Section: Recent Studies By Karen Harvey and Matthew Mccormack Pinpoinmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contesting Masculinities in Thomas Amory's The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756‐66)

Lines¹

2018

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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Long dismissed as eccentric and implausible, the fiction of Thomas Amory has more recently been highlighted for its formal experimentalism and distinctive views of Irish life. This article reads Amory's The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756‐66) as a novel that engages critically with sentimental images of men as caring husbands and fathers, which were extended to middling‐sort as well as elite patriarchs. The novel illustrates the extent to which stock figures such as the ‘man of feeling’ were contested, and reveals how masculinity intersected with class and nationality, through its tale of a poverty‐stricken Irish gentleman.

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“…Octavia, Marcellus and their social circle express the kind of sentimental ‘fellow feeling’ that Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759] 2009), building on a great number of earlier thinkers, presents as the fibre and fabric that will keep the new commercial, capitalist society of the eighteenth century together and which is of signal importance for the eighteenth‐century novel (see e.g. Brissenden ; Mullan ; Ellis ; Skinner ).…”

Section: Fielding's Lives Of Cleopatra and Octaviamentioning

confidence: 99%

When Social Minds Get into Trouble

Kukkonen

2016

Orbis Litterarum

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Fictional minds have taken a central role in cognitive narratology, from Lisa Zunshine's appropriation of the debates around so‐called ‘theory of mind’ (2007) to Alan Palmer's work on ‘fictional minds’ (2004), and, more recently, his discussion of Social Minds in the Novel (2010). Palmer brings to the fore instances in which characters think collectively, such as the ‘Middlemarch mind’, but he also acknowledges the possibility of interplay between externalist and internalist perspectives on fictional minds. The present article proposes to extend Palmer's discussion to include not only successful social minds but also those that get into trouble in ways interesting to narrative study. Drawing on texts by Sarah Fielding and Edward Gibbon, written in the eighteenth century, a time when the boundaries between the public and the private were renegotiated, the article develops an account of the dynamics of social minds between internalist and externalist narrative modes. It shows how these dynamics relate to the development of plot and how they come to the fore in narrative strategies, such as opaque embedded intentionalities, polyphony and irony.

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Sensibility and Economics in the Novel

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Possessed by property: Inheritance in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748)

Possessed by property: Inheritance in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748)

Contesting Masculinities in Thomas Amory's The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756‐66)

When Social Minds Get into Trouble

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