Lynn Festa's new book is a strong contribution to the emerging scholarship that studies eighteenth-century literature and culture through the critical lens of long-durational globalization. Whereas the previous dominance of postcolonial theory tended to lead scholars to view the eighteenth century as merely a precursor to the full-blown imperialism of the nineteenth century, Festa joins the ranks of other literary historians, including Katie Trumpener and Srinivas Aravamudan, who have complicated our understanding of how eighteenth-century writers of the metropole conceptualized their relationship to the colonies and outposts that their countries were rapidly acquiring. Festa's focus on the sentimental mode of writing, moreover, lends her study several unique attributes that make it well worth reading in full.

Festa begins by telling us that her project is “concerned with the margins of the Enlightenment” (1), a pun that operates on several levels simultaneously: the book not only takes as its focus a phenomenon—the popularity of the sentimental—frequently dismissed as merely incidental to the eighteenth century's dominant emphasis on rationalism, but it also pays close and sustained attention to the presence of geographically marginal people and things in British and French texts from this period. In fact, the book's divided attention between the aforementioned national representations is not entirely even; most of the first four chapters are devoted to the British perspective, and only the fifth (on Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes) is completely dedicated to French material. Although her dual national commitment tends to slide in and out of focus, Festa makes several illuminating comparisons between the differing conceptions of empire espoused by the two European rivals. The French, it turns out, tended to see humanity as a general principle from which to derive an understanding of particular peoples, whereas the British “were more inclined to conceive of the subject as a rights-bearing or possessive, self-proprietary individual” (59). As a result, the French generally strove for the absorption of foreign people in their colonial policies, whereas the British stressed mutual exchange and trade between individuals when representing their colonial activities.

Despite these differences, both nations found themselves in (often literally) uncharted territory as their terrestrial empires swelled. Feelings, Festa argues, provided them with a powerful tool for making sense of their newly expanded horizons. On the one hand, the British especially wanted to find ways to imagine what they had in common with their newly acquired imperial subjects; thus, such Enlightened luminaries as David Hume and Adam Smith developed the concept of sympathy, by which emotions were believed to be shared readily between people. On the other hand, this celebration of feeling was shadowed by the recognition that its universality was problematic in the context of empire: sympathy, as Festa shows in her first chapter, threatened to break down the distinctions between people, thus undercutting the salient differences between the metropolitan elite and their colonial subjects. The sentimental mode, in turn, provided a way for authors to help readers reclaim their emotions, creating communities of “like-feeling souls bonded through their common relationship to a shared but excluded object of feeling” (15). In other words, there are those who feel and those who are felt about, and the sentimental mode itself both creates and polices that difference.

After establishing the basic format and function of the sentimental in her first chapter, Festa turns her attention to various manifestations of sentimental figures in the literature and culture of the eighteenth century. Chapter 2, “Sterne's Snuffbox,” starts with a close reading of those passages in A Sentimental Journey that feature the snuffbox given to Yorick by a French monk to show how certain objects are endowed with sentimental value by being removed from the usual circuits of commercial exchange. By the chapter's conclusion, however, this formula has been productively complicated by Festa's examination of Laurence Sterne's self-consciousness with regard to the very real (monetary) value that can be generated by sentimental commerce; in short, Sterne was well aware of the fact that sentiment sells. In the third chapter, “Tales Told by Things,” Festa interrogates two popular sentimental subgenres: object narratives and slave autobiographies. Here, her insightful intervention is to recognize that the latter is really a type of the former: since slaves were technically the property of their masters, the tales told by ex-slaves narrate the transformation of objects into subjects. Moreover, if the ideological labor of object narratives is to naturalize ownership (as the things in question always desire to be claimed by good owners), then, as Festa convincingly argues, slave autobiographies (here represented by Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative) had to have recourse to a higher authority, usually God, whose spiritual address confirms the slave's transformation from object to subject; as Festa explains, “If Equiano seeks a God able to form his life into a providential pattern, a secondary task of the autobiography is to fashion a self able to make a God that can make that self” (149). This theme of self-fashioning is held over into the fourth chapter, “Making Humans Human,” in which Festa—through readings of Josiah Wedgwood's abolitionist medallion, Janet Schaw's diary, William Cowper's poetry, and parliamentary debates—demonstrates how sentimental rhetoric allowed the British to argue for the inhumanity of the slave trade while simultaneously withholding full recognition of political rights to actual slaves. The consistent and repeated call that Britons learn to feel strongly about slavery, no matter how well-intentioned, still left the actual job of feeling—and thus of being fully human—to white citizens. Compounded with growing fears that sensibility was a feminine quality not fit for the masculine bourgeois sphere, moreover, it became clear, as Festa indicates in her conclusion, that sentimentality was a mode of knowing others with definite limits. Yet Festa ends her book with a timely warning: we ought not to dismiss too quickly a mode of understanding the world that so clearly contains within itself an “internal critique” of its own practices and assumptions (240). Moreover, given its popularity throughout eighteenth-century Britain, we make a mistake—which Festa's study goes a long way toward correcting—if we dismiss the sentimental mode as mere fashion and neglect to see its importance as an integral discourse of imperial subjectivity.