Failures of Feeling
This book recovers the curious history of the "insensible" in the Age of Sensibility. Tracking this figure through the English novel's uneven and messy past, Wendy Anne Lee draws on Enlightenment theories of the passions to place philosophy back into conversation with narrative. Contemporary critical theory often simplifies or disregards earlier accounts of emotions, while eighteenth-century studies has focused on cultural histories of sympathy. In launching a more philosophical inquiry about what emotions are, Failures of Feeling corrects for both of these oversights. Proposing a fresh take on emotions in the history of the novel, its chapters open up literary history's most provocative cases of unfeeling, from the iconic scrivener who would prefer not to and the reviled stock figure of the prude, to the heroic rape survivor, the burnt-out man-of-feeling, and the hard-hearted Jane Austen herself. These pivotal cases of insensibility illustrate a new theory of mind and of the novel predicated on an essential paradox: the very phenomenon that would appear to halt feeling and plot actually compels them. Contrary to the assumption that fictional investment relies on a richness of interior life, Lee shows instead that nothing incites the passions like dispassion.
"Arguing for the novel as a form provoked and sustained by the vexatious philosophical problem of insensibility, Wendy Lee anchors high theory in history, providing striking new readings of a wide range of canonical and lesser-known texts. Her elegant, witty, and sociable prose makes unfeeling endlessly engaging."—Helen Deutsch, University of California at Los Angeles
"Wendy Lee makes the bold, paradigm-shifting argument that unfeeling is the heart—the inscrutable, insensible heart!—of the novel. She does so with bravura style and impressive range, producing a book that is both memorable and persuasive."—Sarah Kareem, University of California, Los Angeles
"Lee traces insensibility from 'the unlikely stock figure of the prude' to Austen'sSense and Sensibilityand Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'—from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe to George Eliot's Gwendolen Harleth. Along the way, she blends philosophical erudition and a series of razor-sharp readings with an uncommon wit that ratifies the absolute centrality of insensibility in the novel but also in the world...Essential."––J. Risinger, CHOICE
"Wendy Lee's book is an astonishing achievement. Not simply has she turned inside-out one of our deeply held beliefs about eighteenth-century literature and culture—that the novel is an exercise in cultivating and celebrating sensibility—but she has also presented us with a series of compelling new readings of some of the eighteenth century's most-read fictions....Each strikingly original chapter presents a new facet of the problem she investigates, never falling into the pattern of reiteration with new evidence, but instead, driving the argument further and deeper, nuancing her central contention in ways that continually surprise and amaze."—Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, The Review of English Studies
"Wendy Anne Lee makes me think about what we feel privately. Her brilliantly contrarian Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel looks at what happens when the answer is nothing....a dazzlingly original and irreverent monograph."—Jayne Lewis, Studies in English Literature
"Through her capacious research, masterful close readings, and exquisitely stylish prose, Wendy Anne Lee presents her readers with an enlightening study of the preeminent genre of fiction that the British Enlightenment would produce....she offers what is no less than a new way of reading the novel—a method that is as attuned to the expressiveness of silence as it is to profusive embodiments of emotion."—Kirstin M. Girten, Modern Philology
"A significant contribution to the study of both eighteenth-century philosophy and novel theory, Failures of Feeling—like its central figures—will no doubt generate significant response. It is the rare monograph that I feel the need—but also the willingness—to reread upon finishing, but I am certain that returning to Lee's text will only reveal new connections and depths."—Stephanie Insley Hershinow, Eighteenth-Century Fiction
"Failures of Feeling is an absorbing, challenging, and profound work....While it may be true that the narrative trajectories of most of the novels Lee discusses flirt with tragedy and irresolution, in her hands the beauty of these works shines more brightly than ever."—Adela Pinch, Novel
