About The Book
Henry Mackenzie's third and last novel was one of the better-known works to emerge in the wake of Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloise, at the end...
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of the eighteenth century, but it is no mere copy of its influential forbear.In the introduction to this new edition of a novel immediately popular with contemporaries but neglected by twentieth-century readers, Susan Manning argues that this final fiction of the author of The Man of Feeling represents not the dying gasp of the literature of sentiment, but an experiment which, in searching the psychological bankruptcies of sensibility, charts new ground in the fictional representation of emotional disturbance. MacKenzie's challenging use of the epistolary form subtly traces the processes by which a mind comes to disorder; the novel's melodramatic climax ceases to gesture back towards Rousseau and the world of virtuous sensibility, and points instead towards the self-alienation and disintegration explored in later Scottish masterpieces such as James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner or J. MacDougall Hay's Gillespie.
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