Romantic Sensibility :: Romantic Period

In life as well as literature, some sought to introduction their sensibility by weeping and fainting and blushing and reacting extravagantly to scenes of poverty or illness. Sensibility was understood as a capacity intimately connected with the corporeal nature of nerves. Essential to its existence was its operation on the body as well as the mind. Thus a propensity to blush and weep major power be taken as evidence that the weepers, full of sensibility, loved their neighbours as themselves. (Spacks 141)During the Romantic period, the Sensibility movement began as a result, the conduct of private affections, charity, education, sympathy, genius, honour, and steady the use of reasonbecame political statements (Jones 13). Romantic Sensibility essentially moralized the enactment of sensitivity towards others (Spacks 127), arguing that empathetically-based relationships bring individuals together to form a unified, respectful, and moral genial sphere. Key characteristics of the move ments literary adaptation include anti-rationalism, a focus on emotional response and somatized reactions (tears, swoons, deathly pallor), a prevailing mood of melancholy, fragmentation of form, and set-piece scenes of fairness in distress (Manning 81). The relationship between the novel of Romantic Sensibility and the Gothic novel is worth further academic inquiry as, similar to the music genre of the Gothic, there is often a tendency in novels of Romantic Sensibility to play with excess and arousal (with all the connotations of uncontrollable sexual excitation implied) (Manning 90).