Volume 46, Number 15 · October 7, 1999
The American Love Boat
By Gordon S. Wood
Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image
by Andrew Burstein
Hill and Wang, 406 pp., $28.00
The eighteenth century used to be the 'Age of Reason.' But not anymore. Now it has become the 'Age of Sen-sibility.' The heart has replaced the head. Everywhere recently literary and historical scholars have discovered that in the so-called Enlightenment feelings seem to have been more important than thought, emotion more important than intellect. Perhaps this recent scholarly tendency is symptomatic of our time, with its often mawkish sentimentality and lots of people, including the President, feeling other people's pain. Or perhaps it is due to the new interest in gender history and the ways in which feminine feelings asserted themselves in the eighteenth century, particularly in the new form of the novel. But whatever the reasons there is no denying the extent to which scholars have come to regard sentiment and sensibility as the animating moral force of the eighteenth century.
Review, 4301 words
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