![]() I extend the approach in this essay, which discusses a set of related terms, including the stage metaphor, sympathetic affect, theatrical artifice and emotional excess, infection, passion and madness. ![]() From this network of phrases (observable throughout Caleb Williams), a revised understanding of Godwin's views on the sublime becomes possible. In particular, terms associated with sublimity, benevolence, and the divine are contrasted with a set of concepts relating to the infernal, the tyrannical, and the calamitous as undersides of the sublime. This essay is a companion piece to my "William Godwin's Caleb Williams: The Tarnishing of the Sublime,"2 on Godwin's deployment of the Burkean sublime, which bases its analysis on a network of key terms and phrases. Sympathy is an ineluctable need for the individual, but sympathetic involvement, besides elevating humanity to a status of semi-divine fellowship, also carries with it the dangers of infection and corruption, of illegitimate attraction and fatal obsession. The subject eliciting sympathy may do so either truthfully or deceptively, giving rise to a long discussion about the artfulness and rhetoricity of sympathetic appeal. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Number 1, October 2001 2 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION negatively in terms of infection or contamination. ![]() This essay is dedicated to Professor Willi Erzgräber on his seventy-fifth birthday. Pamela Clemit (London: William Pickering, 1992), which follows the text of the first edition. Comparison will be made with Things As They Are or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. References are to this edition, which is based on the first edition of 1794, but integrates later changes in the second and third editions. David McCracken (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. Sympathy is figured positively in terms of affection, love, reverence, and admiration and 1 William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. William Godwin reinterprets the theatrical scenario within an extended conception of sympathy that also helps to explain the psychology of major characters as facets of the workings of mutual attraction, that is, sympathy. 27 In the opening words ofhis narrative, Caleb Williams says that "for several years" his life has been "a theatre of calamity."1 This essay traces the manifestations of the theatrical metaphor in Caleb Williams (1794) and links the staging of Caleb's (and Falkland's) "tragedy" with the spectacle of sympathy that underpins theatrical representation in Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas ofthe Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). But I cannot bear to be surrounded with tokens of abhorrence and scorn. I call heaven to witness that I could mount the scaffold, surrounded with an innumerable multitude to applaud my fortitude, and to feel as it were on their own neck the blow that ended me, and count it a festival. Spectacle, Theatre, and Sympathy in Caleb Williams Monika Fludernik There is no pleasure more congenial to the human heart, than the approbation and affection of our fellows. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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