Fred Kaplan

Sacred Tears (eBook, ePUB)

Sentimentality in Victorian Literature

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

An absorbing study of the evolution of sentiment in Victorian life and literature What is sentimentality, and where did it come from? For acclaimed scholar and biographer Fred Kaplan, the seeds were planted by the British moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. The Victorians gained from them a theory of human nature, a belief in the innateness of benevolent moral instincts; sentiment, in turn, emerged as a set of shared moral feelings in opposition to both scientific realism and the more ego-driven energies of Romanticism. Sacred Tearsinvestigates the profound ways in which seminal writers Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Carlyle were influenced by the philosophies of David Hume and Adam Smith, and by novelists of the same period. Exploring sentiment in its original context-one often forgotten or overlooked-Kaplan's study is a stimulating fusion of intellectual history and literary criticism, and holds no small importance for questions of art and morality as they exist today.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Open Road Media
• Seitenzahl: 156
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. April 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781480409811
• Artikelnr.: 44350487

Autorenporträt

Fred Kaplan (b. 1937) has written biographies of Charles Dickens, Henry James, Abraham Lincoln, Gore Vidal, and Mark Twain, as well as Sacred Tears, a study of sentimentality in Victorian literature. His biography Thomas Carlyle(1983) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Kaplan is distinguished professor emeritus of English at both Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.