Sentimental novel

The sentimental novel is an 18th century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment , sentimentalism and sensibility.

Sentimentalism, sometimes known as sensibility (or "the cult of sensibility"), was a fashion in both poetry and fiction beginning in the eighteenth century.

Sentimental novels are related to the domestic fiction of the early eighteenth century. Among the most famous sentimental novels are Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768) and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771).

Sentiment is represented in Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela (1740). The term and the literary style originate in medieval French (and later English) romances, in which the hero is usually preoccupied with his or her love and love sufferings.

Along with a new vision of love, sentimentalism presented a new view of human nature which prized feeling over thinking, passion over reason, and personal instincts of "pity, tenderness, and benevolence" over social duties.

The first and possibly most prominent example of sentimental fiction in America is Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World.