Sentiment and Sociability

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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 eighteenth-century fiction now called sentimental.