This study examines the autobiographical writing of Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and David Hume, who chronicled the peculiarly intimate relationships between the texts they produced and the social lives they lived. Each relied on a language of feeling to represent social bonds they considered necessary, discovering, through their writing, a sociability dependent on the communication of passions and sentiments. This discovery, Mullan argues, played a critical role in the development of the 18th-century fiction now called "sentimental."

Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century

John Mullan

Literature & Fiction

Oxford University Press

Anonymity A Secret History Of English Literature

Faber & Faber Inc, United Kingdom

<p>What are the right and wrong ways to propose marriage? How old is Mr Collins? And why is it risky to go to the seaside? One of the delights of reading Jane Austen is noticing the puzzles she sets her readers. In 20 succinct chapters, Mullan asks and answers a number of apparently superficial questions about Austens world, to demonstrate how its rituals and conventions reveal her technical virtuosity and sheer daring as a novelist.</p>

What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

Reference

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist

History & Criticism

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Books by John Mullan