The cultures of sensibility explored in Chapter Four authorised women to write, but as the chapter shows, the concept was equally influential among male writers, and contributed in significant ways to Romantic-period aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Eighteenth-century aesthetics reflected a new interest in the body and the senses. Like Romantic nature, Romantic sensibility is presented as a story of co-becoming, in this case between body and mind rather than between mind and nature. After discussing the difficulty of defining sensibility, the chapter provides a history of eighteenth-century neurophysiology, including the ground-breaking work of Haller, the electrical experiments of Galvani, and Bonnet’s invention of psychology. Steiner then turns to Rousseau to demonstrate the transition from medical to moral sensibility, and how sympathy operated as a central principle among Edinburgh’s moral sense philosophers. Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey helped spread moral sympathy across Europe, linking it with the feminisation of culture and with various reform movements, as shown in examples ranging from Chateaubriand to Jean Paul, a Danish anti-slavery narrative to the ‘Revolution debate’ in Britain. The chapter ends on an ambivalent note, using the Pygmalion motif to address the often-criticised connection between sensibility and narcissism.

In Chapter 1, I read the first two acts of Byron’s Swiss lyrical drama, Manfred, as an allegory of the above passage from “ancient” to “modern” liberty, showing how Romantic-period writers could represent the Swiss myth both sympathetically and skeptically in order to maintain a link between classical republicanism and liberalism. Byron’s sympathetic portrait of the chamois hunter, in particular, offers one of the last radical interpretations of Swiss-style republicanism. I then review the historical and ideological origins of the Swiss myth in Switzerland itself, going back to the Renaissance but focusing on eighteenth-century writers whose ideal of a free and happy alpine republic I contrast with the Old Confederacy’s historical realities. While the Swiss myth could express a range of ideological positions before the French Revolution, I show how post-revolutionary authors such as Staël and Karl Ludwig von Haller helped crystallize it as an expression of customary Freiheit rather than of rational liberté.