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Author:   Wendy Anne Lee
Publisher:   Stanford University Press
Imprint:   Stanford University Press
Edition:   New edition
ISBN:  

9781503606807

ISBN 10:   1503606805
Pages:   277
Publication Date:   18 December 2018
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

"Contents and Abstracts1A Brief History of the Prude chapter abstractThis chapter locates an unlikely precursor to Bartleby in the stock figure of the prude, whose ubiquity in early print culture attests to a primary connection in the history of the novel between insensibility and gender. Diving into an elaborate, seventeenth-century taxonomy of female subjects, this discussion highlights the précieuses, a fraught libertine construction that registered the political and social discomforts generated by women's writing. Eighteenth-century English prude fictions, this chapter argues, extend the feminocentric threat of the précieuses (to estate, sovereignty, and conjugality) and import the punitive script of their transformation, a story line dedicated to the violent exposure of female feeling. The chapter concludes with a reading of Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, a breathtaking novel that revises and redeems Descartes's account of desire in The Passions of the Soul. 2Clarissa's Marble Heart chapter abstractThis chapter explicates Samuel Richardson's prime demonstration of the doomed logic of insensibility in European fiction, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady. The so-called father of the psychological novel, Richardson distilled narrative purpose into the probing of female interiority. Newly framed by early prude fictions, Clarissa, this section argues, can be understood through a long-standing and deeply gendered anxiety about dualism, or the metaphysical gaps between sensation, speech, and action. Drawing on John Locke's concept of ""indifferency"" and Frances Ferguson's crucial theorization of rape and the psychological novel, the chapter spotlights the embedded narrative of Clarissa's life as an urban rape survivor. Insensibility, it argues, embeds a trenchant countermodel within a Richardsonian project. 3The Man of No Feeling chapter abstractThis chapter turns to sentimental fiction's man of feeling, radically reinterpreting his fine-tuned sensibility as a late iteration of sovereign contempt. In a close look at the insensible who loomed largest over the eighteenth century, Charles I, this discussion takes up the phenomenon of laughter, what Hobbes controversially defined as a triumphant glorying in the infirmities of others. Reconnecting power to humor, the analysis focuses on Oliver Goldsmith, a Grub Street writer who exploited his period's tipping point between satire and sentiment. Dissatisfied with what he regarded as the distinct humorlessness of the novel, Goldsmith turned to theater's ready-made insensible, the hero of comic misrule, Puck. Arguing for the political transformations of that figure in early modernity, the chapter depicts the ""insensible cub"" Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer as the fictional force that reanimates sovereign laughter. 4Sense, Insensibility, Sympathy chapter abstractChapter 4 features the figure of godlike dispassion who presides at the apex of the novel form, Jane Austen. The case of Austen's insensibility exemplifies the ways in which failures of feeling are entwined with narrative failure and how the charge of contempt so often marks a disruption to protocols of fiction. This analysis focuses on the curdled plot of Sense and Sensibility, whose stalwart Elinor Dashwood has been identified with Austen herself. Examining David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, a text considered to be the philosophical companion to Austen's oeuvre, this chapter examines the qualities of resemblance, contiguity, and causation that conduce to sympathy in Hume's account, or what in Austen's novel makes emotion a contagion, or one sister's pain feel distressingly like the other's. Conclusion: Death Wish for the Novel chapter abstractI conclude this study of insensibility with George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, a late nineteenth-century novel that draws together the different strands of the Bartleby problem presented by the book: the ridiculed dream of female sovereignty in prude fictions, the anxious and sadistic logic of the Richardsonian plot, the inevitable burnout of the man of feeling, and the compromising ethics of intimacy in Jane Austen. Eliot, this reading argues, brings these elements to bear in order to euthanize a genre that relies on the now thoroughly pathologized principle by which insensibility inflames the passions. Featured here is the character of the Alcharisi, a brilliant conflation of Diderot's paradoxically dispassionate actor and Defoe's flagrantly unmaternal mother, revived by Eliot to call out the constraints of the novel form. Introduction: The Bartleby Problem chapter abstractThe introduction lays out the book's theory at large through a reading of Herman Melville's ""Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street,"" which features fiction's most infamous insensible, a motionless young clerk who would prefer not to. The analysis here draws on the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and contemporary affect theorists to showcase and explain that signature feeling of unfeeling: contempt. Reframing the Bartleby problem from a picture of capitalist abjection to a fundamental philosophical problem about narrative, this introduction returns to the riddle of the unmoved or prime mover as the instigator of all motions and, it argues, emotions."

Reviews

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 * 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 * <i>Modern Philology</i> * 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 * <i>The Review of English Studies</i> * 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 * <i>Eighteenth-Century Fiction </i> * 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 * In this stunningly original book, Wendy Anne Lee looks beyond the usual suspects in the history of the novel. A masterful stylist who navigates between wit and eloquence with admirable brio, she often made me laugh out loud-and almost made me weep. -- Deidre Lynch * Harvard University * 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 * <i>Studies in English Literature</i> * 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 * <i>Novel</i> *

In this stunningly original book, Wendy Lee looks beyond the usual suspects in the history of the novel. A masterful stylist who navigates between wit and eloquence with admirable brio, she often made me laugh out loud--and almost made me weep. --Deirdre Lynch Harvard University 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

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'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 * <i>The Review of English Studies</i> * 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 In this stunningly original book, Wendy Anne Lee looks beyond the usual suspects in the history of the novel. A masterful stylist who navigates between wit and eloquence with admirable brio, she often made me laugh out loud-and almost made me weep. -- Deidre Lynch * Harvard University * 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 *

Author Information

Wendy Anne Lee is Assistant Professor of English at New York University.

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