It may seem paradoxical to assert that a book that announces itself as being about “insensibility” or “failures” of feeling has much to say about powerful emotional experience. But Wendy Anne Lee's Failures of Feeling demonstrates that we feel most acutely in the face of emotional detachment, neutrality, and insensibility. “Nothing,” she writes, with characteristic epigrammatic verve, “incites the passions like dispassion” (1). Within the field of eighteenth-century novel studies, the striking intervention of Failures of Feeling is to work against the grain of what is often also called “The Age of Feeling” or “The Age of Sensibility.” In contrast to the many studies that have focused on the era's seemingly unequivocal love of over-the-top displays of emotion and its emphasis on sympathy and emotional contagion, Lee argues that such a picture is incomplete. She demonstrates that focusing on the strong counter-tradition of novelistic and philosophical representations of seemingly opposite...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
November 1, 2020
Issue Editors
Book Review|
November 01 2020
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure Available to Purchase
Lee, Wendy Anne,
Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel
(Stanford
: Stanford UP
, 2018
), pp. 248
, cloth, $55.00.
Adela Pinch
Adela Pinch
University of Michigan
ADELA PINCH is professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is author of two books, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemology of Emotion, Hume to Austen (1996) and Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (2010). She is currently completing a monograph called “Victorian Fiction and the Location of Experience: Four Essays on Women Writers.”
Search for other works by this author on:
Novel (2020) 53 (3): 473–475.
Citation
Adela Pinch; Nothing Succeeds Like Failure. Novel 1 November 2020; 53 (3): 473–475. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8624661
Download citation file:
Advertisement
182
Views