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

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."Mullan, John is the author of 'Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century', published 1988 under ISBN 9780198128656 and ISBN 0198128657.