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,
will be important reading for students and teachers of poetry, ideas and the novel.