This chapter explores race and sexuality in three parts. After a preamble that explores uses and definitions of race both historically and by historians, the first part examines representations of race and sexuality in relation to the politics of race and sexuality, via such historical figures as Sarah Baartman, Josephine Baker, and Jane Nardal. The second part considers administrative and legal policies as well as forms of social control that were used to control sexuality along the colour line, with references to Cleopatra, legal codes such as the Code Noir, the Scottsboro affair, sex work, and sex talk in the Americas, West Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The third part considers a newer trend towards exploring the influences of love, family, community, and kinship networks upon discussions and experiences of sexuality and race, via examples such as the Signares of Senegal or the ballroom houses of Harlem. One of the points of this chapter is to show how histories of empires, and those of encounters between the Global North and the Global South, were also histories of sex and race.

This considers the relationship between the elevation of the novel into moral respectability and the turn to anti-heroic discourse. The novels of Daniel Defoe (works influenced by rogue narratives) show little interest in representations of feminine virtue of the kind Richardson foregrounds in his influential Pamela. Where Defoe represents martial violence with relatively few reservations, in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, a concern with feminine virtue is accompanied by anti-heroic discourse which entails critical views of war. As novelists, Fielding and Smollett both represent the malign effects of modern war while, in Amelia, Fielding even represents a form of pacifist feeling. The chapter ends with discussion of the anonymous Ephraim Tristram Bates, in which a potentially excellent soldier is defeated by a corrupt system of military patronage, and of Sternes Tristram Shandy, in which martial virtue has become a matter of moral sentiment, destructive of domestic order.

This chapter focuses on planters manuals beyond Saint-Domingue published by Jean Samuel Guisan and Jean-Baptiste Poyen de Sainte-Marie. Writing respectively in the very different circumstances of an underdeveloped French Guiana and an economically mature Guadeloupe, both writers urged planters to adopt technological innovations, regiment their workforce, keep detailed records, and prioritize long-term profitability over short-term profits. Publishing in close proximity to the French and Haitian Revolutions (1788 and 1792, respectively), they also had to consider increased anti-slavery sentiment, even revolutionary ferment, in expressing their pro-slavery views. They responded by promoting the ideal of an “enlightened” planter, which is contrasted to the ideas of the marquis de Casaux, published in a 1781 treatise. Appropriating the language of sentiment, Guisan and Poyen folded “humanity” into plantation management, asserting that this would harmonize with the planter’s self-interest and increase his happiness by promoting that of the enslaved. Ultimately, though, they construed the planter’s mastery differently: for Poyen, a benevolent plantation monarch ruled over his subjects while Guisan’s planter was accountable to a wider social and political order devoted to collective good.

For Adam Smith, resentment is the natural passion we feel at experiencing or witnessing injustice and the basis for our natural sense of justice. Why does Smith restrict justifiable resentment to injustice given his seeming admission that we do naturally feel resentment beyond the case of injury? Smith never directly addresses why such resentments are inappropriate in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; we reconstruct a response drawn from his moral psychology. First, we explain the origins of Smith’s narrow view of justice. We then turn to Smith’s account of resentment, explaining its purpose as the natural motive for narrow justice, questioning the split between descriptive and normative resentment. We ultimately argue that resentment’s logical tie to punishment for Smith is necessary but insufficient, and that injury and resentment are separate conditions required to justify punishment. Finally, we reconstruct Smith’s normative justifications for severing the tie between improper resentments and punishment, driven by his claims about equal status and about sociability.

Hutcheson and Butler were contemporaries whose best-known works appeared within a year of one another. Although they had similar intellectual temperaments and styles, their philosophical approaches differed in important ways that reverberated through thinkers that followed. Both were sharply analytical, and both shared a keen insight into moral psychology. Moreover, both laid great stress on the psychology of moral judgment. Hutcheson called this, following Shaftesbury, “moral sense,” and Butler referred to it alternately as the “principle of reflection” or “conscience.” For both, moral judgment involves the human capacity to (more or less successfully) reflect upon and respond affectively to motives, characters, and actions in dispassionate impartial way. However, the role of moral reflection for these two philosophers is profoundly different. For Hutcheson, it is an observer’s moral sense that enables a person to make moral evaluations of motivation and actions, but these evaluations are not self-reflexive – the agent is not evaluating their own, or even others’, moral sense. For Butler, on the other hand, conscience is a moral faculty by which agents crucially make judgments of themselves, judgments they employ to shape their own actions. Conscience is action-guiding for Butler in a way that moral sense is not for Hutcheson.

This chapter explores the beginning of the end of the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility and the origins of surgical scientific modernity. It illuminates this crucial period of transition through the juxtaposition of two distinct but conceptually and ideologically intertwined moments in surgical history. These are, firstly, the debates surrounding the practice of anatomical dissection that came to the fore in the 1820s and culminated in the passage of the Anatomy Act in 1832, and, secondly, the introduction and early use of inhalation anaesthesia in the later 1840s. In both instances it highlights the powerful influence of utilitarian thought in divesting the body, both as object and subject, of emotional meaning and agency. In the former instance it demonstrates how an ultra-rationalist understanding of sentiment was set in opposition to popular ‘sentimentalism’ in order to divest the dead bodies of the poor of emotional value. Meanwhile, in the latter, it considers how the emotional subjectivity of the newly anaesthetised patient was swiftly tamed by the operations of a techno-scientific rationale.

Ranging across Beckett’s work before focusing, in particular, on the stories Malone tells in Malone Dies, I demonstrate the persistence of the emancipatory potential of sentimental fiction in this seemingly most anti-sentimental writer. Sympathy, for Joyce, held the promise of crossing class boundaries. Beckett, in contrast, reads class divisions as internal to the modern subject. Thus, the encounter between beggar and bourgeois that his work repeatedly stages – as in the structure of Molloy – is constitutive of capitalist modernity’s construction of subjectivity where freedom is always mediated by dispossession. Beckett’s subjects suffer alone. Seeing no way out of the infinite catastrophe his works present, Beckett nevertheless retains the possibility of human recognition. Sentimental fictions emerge, here, as one of the many conventions Beckett scrutinizes and inhabits, their persistence giving us an avenue into the history that has made its mark on his work, even as that work strives to efface its traces.

This chapter is about sensibility, which is the term that was commonly used in the second half of the eighteenth century to refer to a special capacity to respond with sensitivity to one’s environment. Colloquially understood as the heightened responsiveness of feeling or emotion, sensibility – in cultural, literary, artistic, historical, social, philosophical, and political contexts – reached far beyond what either of these more familiar terms convey. Eighteenth-century thinking about sensibility, in all of its complexity, remains deeply relevant to twenty-first century theories of affect, feeling, and emotion, and provides robust resources for, and in some cases correctives to, current theoretical and philosophical thought.

Chapter 3 concerns attitudes as well as attitude dimensions and structure, including ambivalence. Attitudes have both a memory component and a judgment component. This aspect is important because recognizing attitude change is not possible without recognizing that these two components are part of attitudes. The chapter also covers the relation between attitude relevant memories and evaluative judgments, my research on specific and general attitudes toward objects and behaviors, including actions and inactions, and the degree to which attitudes predict behavior, including a meta-meta-analysis of the attitude behavior relation.

In Section 1 of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume claims that those who deny the reality of morals are disingenuous. He notes that philosophy has had a history of disagreements about whether morals originate in reason or sentiment. Throughout his book, Hume applies an experimental method to find the “universal principles” from which morality is derived. Then, in Appendix 1, he argues for the origin of these principles in sentiment or taste, a product of “the human fabric.” Reason, Hume says, discovers objects “as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution.” Taste “has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation.” How can the quest for universal principles find a satisfactory answer in taste, a “productive” faculty? How is the notion that morality is a “new creation” consistent with an insistence on the reality of moral distinctions? Are the deliverances of taste, which are prompts to virtue, also judgments that can be evaluated as true or false? This essay shows that, on a proper reading, the elements of Hume’s moral epistemology in the second Enquiry are largely consistent.

This chapter considers sentiment and sensation as intertwined subgenres of early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It argues that understanding how sentimental forms harness ideas about end times to advocate for change in the first half of the century requires acknowledging how both sentiment and sensation stage dramatic, tension-filled moments. After reviewing recent scholarship on intersections between sentiment and terror and the complex religiosity of nineteenth-century sentimental traditions, the chapter turns to George Lippard’s 1845 novel The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall to illustrate how relationships between fiction, visuality, and theater and performance culture function to create apocalyptic spectacle. Discourses of spectatorship in a sensational novel such as Lippard’s and in a sentimental novel such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) are central to tensions between faith and doubt in an era characterized by both reform movements and vibrant visual and performance cultures.