Book Review: Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction by Alex Wetmore

Alex Wetmore, Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2013). Pp. 207. $95.00.

Reviewed by: Amelia Dale

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Eighteenth-century printed texts are notoriously self-aware about the circumstances of their production and dissemination. The relationship between self-reflexivity and literary form has been explored by such figures as Christina Lupton, Deidre Lynch, Christopher Flint, and Tom Keymer, among others. Alex Wetmore argues for the congruity between the printed bodies of sentimental books and the mechanized men of feeling presented within their pages. Sentimentalism’s stress on embodied emotive expression is crucially related to the eighteenth century’s [End Page 547] preoccupation with the physicality of the book; print’s palpability becomes crucial to its capacity to elicit emotion. The subtitle, Touching Fiction, refers to how sentimental fictions deploy tactility in order to become emotionally and allegorically “touching.” The cover illustration, an anonymous etching with engraving titled “High life at noon” (1769), portrays a man touching a woman’s breast amidst a scene of literary and appetitive consumption. It suggests another, more sexual connotation of “touching fiction.” Yet Wetmore’s interest is not so much in the sexual practices of the men of feeling, but in the way feeling is inscribed on sensible bodies, and what it means to touch, and be touched by, sentimental fiction. What I found especially interesting was the study of sentimentalism’s “touching” of bodies via book-like bodies and bodies in books. This speaks to one of the most fascinating aspects of eighteenth-century writing: its playful coalescence of signifying flesh and printed paper.