The culture of sensibility : sex and society in eighteenth-century Britain / G.J. Barker-Benfield.

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 1996.

xxxiv, 520 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

1. Sensibility and the nervous system -- Wollstonecraft's perspective : the gendering of sensibility -- A new psychoperceptual system -- The application of the new system : George Cheyne, 1671-1743 -- The reformation of manners combined with consumerism -- Nerve theory in novels -- Female nerves and sensibility's ambiguity -- 2. The reformation of male manners -- The public manners of men -- The campaign for the reformation of manners -- Heart religion -- The civilizing process and British commercial capitalism -- Changed environments and the new world of parents and children -- 3. The question of effeminacy -- Shaftesbury -- Mandeville -- Hume and Smith -- Henry MacKenzie -- Politics and boys' literature : Thomas Day -- 4. Women and eighteenth-century consumerism -- Home demand -- Women become literate, women write novels -- Women's self-expression in fashion -- Fiction records women's pleasure seeking -- Ambivalence toward women's pursuit of consumer pleasures -- Taste -- 5. A culture of reform -- Antiworldview -- Women and humanitarian reform -- Stalking horses : the campaign on behalf of victims of male barbarity -- Sensibility's goal : the man of feeling -- Sensibility's method : conversion -- The cult of sensibility -- Methodism and the culture of sensibility -- The rights of woman and the reformation of manners -- 6. Women and individualism : inner and outer struggles over sensibility -- The sentimentalizing process -- Egotism and opposition -- The reality of heroism and romance -- Subversive potentials in women's developing minds : marriage and class -- Still more subversive potentials : sensibility and sex -- 7. Wollstonecraft and the crisis over sensibility in the 1790s -- Amazons at the boundary -- Wollstonecraft, Hays, and the conflict over sensibility -- Wollstonecraft becomes Amazon -- "Man was made to reason, woman to feel" : compromise.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [397]-503) and index.