Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment

282 Pages·2020·4.852 MB·

by  James Noggle

UNFELT

UNFELT
THE LANGUAGE OF AFFECT IN
THE BRITISH ENLIGHTENMENT
James Noggle
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review,
this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any
form without permission in writing from the publisher.
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First published 2020 by Cornell University Press
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Noggle, James, author.
Title: Unfelt : the language of affect in the British
Enlightenment / James Noggle.
Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019017311 (print) | LCCN 2019018072
(ebook) | ISBN 1501747134 (pdf) | ISBN 1501747142
(epub/mobi) | ISBN 1501747126 | ISBN 1501747126
(cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: En glish prose lit er a ture—
18th  century— History and criticism. | Emotions in
lit er a ture. | Enlightenment— Great Britain.
Classification: LCC PR448.E46 (ebook) | LCC PR448.E46
N64 2020 (print) | DDC 820.9/353— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2019017311
Jacket image: The Strode Family, by William Hogarth, ca.
1738. Oil on canvas, 870 × 915 (34 1/4 × 36 in).
Reprinted with permission of Tate Images/Digital
Image © Tate, London 2014.
To Ferrell Mackey

Contents
Acknowl edgments ix
Introduction: Unfelt Affect 1
Chapter I. Philosophy: Affective
Nonconsciousness 25
1. The Insensible Parts of Locke’s Essay 28
2. David Hartley’s Ghost Matter 42
3. Vivacity and Insensible Association:
Condillac and Hume 50
4. Sentiment and Secret Consciousness:
Haywood and Smith 59
Chapter II. Fiction: Unfelt Engagement 69
1. Unfeeling before Sensibility 73
2. External and Invisible 81
3. Insensible against Involuntary in Burney 95
4. Austen as Coda 108
Chapter III. Historiography:
Insensible Revolutions 113
1. The Force of the Thing: Unfelt Moeurs
in French Historiography 117
2. The Insensible Revolution and
Scottish Historiography 126
3. Gibbon in History 137
4. The Embrace of Unfeeling 145
viii Contents
Chapter IV. Po liti cal Economy:
Moving with Money 155
1. Mandev ille and the Other Happiness 159
2. Feeling Untaxed 169
3. The Money Flow 175
4. Invisible versus Insensible 183
Epilogue: Insensible Emergence
of Ideology 191
Notes 197
Bibliography 241
Index 259
Acknowl edgments
A number of p eople and organ izations helped
me in my work on this book since I began it in 2011, and I want to express my
gratitude to them. A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Hu-
manities during the academic year 2014–15 gave a much appreciated vote of
confidence to the proj ect as it was finding its final shape, and allowed me to
do a significant amount of research and writing. (The views, findings, and con-
clusions expressed in this book do not necessarily represent those of the Na-
tional Endowment for the Humanities.) Wellesley College also generously
supported my work during this leave year, and well beyond. I also thank Buck-
nell University Press for allowing me use material in this book from my essay,
“Unfelt Affect,” which appeared in Beyond Sense and Sensibility: Moral Forma-
tion and the Literary Imagination from Johnson to Words worth, edited by Peggy
Thompson (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015). I add a par tic u-
lar thanks to Mahinder Kingra, editor in chief at Cornell University Press and
my acquisitions editor, whose intellectual engagement with the book’s
ideas and pre sen ta tion helped me along a sometimes winding road toward its
acc ep tance for publication. I am grateful too to Brian Bendlin, who copyedited
the manuscript with precision and insight, regularizing what I thought was my
regular system of citation and fixing many errors. All m istakes that remain are,
of course, my doing. And I thank Karen Laun, Mary Ribesky, and the rest of
the production team for their care in bringing the manuscript into print.
I have presented parts of the book’s argument at colloquiums and panel
discussions over the last six years. Several of these pre sen tat ions occurred at
annual meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth-C entury Studies
(ASECS). I first described the proje ct’s principal ideas on a panel put together
by Martine Brownley titled “Beyond Sense and Sensibility” at the ASECS An-
nual Meeting in San Antonio, in 2012; my work on David Hartley found a
place on the panel “Quantifying the Enlightenment,” chaired by Corrinne
Harol in Pittsburgh in 2016; and I presented on affect and the economic writ-
ing of Hume and Adam Smith in Minneapolis on a panel titled “Affect Theory