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Analysing texts by Sterne, Smollett, Brooke, and Mackenzie, this book offers a new perspective on a question that literary criticism has struggled with for years: why are many sentimental novels of the 1700s so pervasively and playfully self-conscious, and why is this self-consciousness so often directed toward the materiality of the printed word?

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Acknowledgements 1. Introductory Matter: Structuring Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2. Body/Language 3. Feeling/Machines 4. Public/Health 5. Concluding Matter: Tear-Blotted Texts and Men of Feeling in the 1790s Afterword Bibliography Index

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Alex Wetmore teaches in the English department at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada.

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