During the last half of the eighteenth century, sensibility and its less
celebrated corollary sense were subject to constant variation, critique,
and contestation in ways that raise profound questions about the
formation of moral identities and communities. Beyond Sense and
Sensibility addresses those questions. What authority does reason retain
as a moral faculty in an age of sensibility? How reliable or desirable
is feeling as a moral guide or a test of character? How does such a
focus contribute to moral isolation and elitism or, conversely, social
connectedness and inclusion? How can we distinguish between that
connectedness and a disciplinary socialization? How do insensible
processes contribute to our moral formation and action? What
alternatives lie beyond the anthropomorphism implied by sense and
sensibility? Drawing extensively on philosophical thought from the
eighteenth century as well as conceptual frameworks developed in the
twenty-first century, this volume of essays examines moral formation
represented in or implicitly produced by a range of texts, including
Boswell's literary criticism, Fergusson's poetry, Burney's novels,
Doddridge's biography, Smollett's novels, Charlotte Smith's children's
books, Johnson's essays, Gibbon's history, and Wordsworth's poetry. The
distinctive conceptual and textual breadth of Beyond Sense and
Sensibility yields a rich reassessment and augmentation of the two
perspectives summarized by the terms sense and sensibility in later
eighteenth-century Britain.