Sentimental Journeys, Vehicular States

From eighteenth-century literature through twentieth-century cinema, the sentimental spectator is a figure in motion, able to assume multiple locations in narrative space. This capacity to move and be moved depends on a kind of quickness that in the discourse of the sentimental comes to be called “sensibility.” This chapter examines sentimental mobility by way of this notion of sensibility in its modern evolution, but also in the conceit that it generated: the sentimental journey.

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Movie theater · Narrative · Sensibility · Space (punctuation) · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Philosophy