SENSIBILITY

A trans-national cultural influence that swept across Europe and North America during the long 18th-century (ca.1660-1830), especially powerfully in England, France, Germany, and eventually, the new American colonies. Central to its various incarnations in these different cultural settings over a broad expanse of time is a focus on the primacy of the emotions and the ability of feeling to travel--often sympathetically, sometimes even contagiously--between individuals, real or imagined. In its more extreme versions, feeling is imagined as a kind of vital life force or (to adopt our more current critical parlance) social energy that connects not only humans with each other, but also with animal and vegetative life, and even with inanimate or imaginary objects. Increasingly, such manifestations of affective excess came to represent a threat in the eyes of critics concerned with the moral and ethical implications of such excesses, especially when they touched on matters of sexuality. Sensibility's diverse characteristics can be seen throughout a host of varied fields we now identify as modern disciplines that were originally less discrete: literature and the arts; political, economic, and social thought; philosophy and religion; the sciences, especially those related to human biology and botany.

Owenson's *The Wild Irish Girl* follows in a long tradition of Sensibility in English literature, particularly through novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Laurence Sterne, among others--many of whom were women writers who are less celebrated in our own day. Continental European influences are clearly referenced in the novel, particularly the two most important touchstones of Sensibility apart from Sterne: Rousseau (1712-1778) in France and Goethe (1749-1832) in Germany. In addition to Rousseau's *Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise* (1761) and Goethe's *The Sorrows of Young Werther* (1774), another sentimental blockbuster inspired by Rousseau should be noted: Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's (1737-1814) *Paul et Virginie* (1788). Novels and prose romances increasingly became the primary vehicle for the circulation of Sensibility in literature, but the mid- and late-eighteenth century English tradition also witnessed a flourishing in other genres, particularly poetry, as The Wild Irish Girl also acknowledges. Both William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith are popular examples. A more complicated influence and inspiration for Owenson is the contested figure known as Ossian. (Click on the links for these figures for more information.)