Radical Sensibility

First published in 1993. Radical Sensibility provides a detailed account of the interrelations of literature, ideas and history in the eighteenth century’s Revolutionary decade. The book traces a continuity of ideas from Shaftesbury to Godwin and Wollstonecraft, and sets it beside a conservative tradition established in the work of Hume and Adam Smith. As a guide to the transformations of ‘sensibility’ as a concept, Jones examines the trajectories of three writers who work spans the decade: Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and the early Wordsworth. A mixture of literary textual analysis and historical and political documentation, Radical Sensibility will be important reading for students and teachers of poetry, ideas and the novel.