Description: Drawing on philosophical thought from the eighteenth century as well as conceptual frameworks developed in the twenty-first century, the essays in Beyond Sense and Sensibility examine moral formation as represented in or implicitly produced by literary works of late eighteenth...
Brief description: Evan Gottlieb is Professor of English at Oregon State University, USA.
Review Quotes: "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." --Choice Reviews