Emotional Light on Eighteenth-Century Print Culture

An established narrative in eighteenth-century studies of Britain details the early dominance of satire, the increase in sympathetic cultural modes, and the implications for different kinds of sociability generated by the long revolution in print culture.1 In this book, we do not wish to overturn this scholarship because we agree that it addresses fundamental aspects of change and stability in the society and culture of a nation that was rising to global prominence. Certainly the self-congratulatory Whig reading of history that has everything rising on a tide of progress towards some sort of liberal apotheosis has been very validly exposed to revision. Without the iron teleology, however, the chapters in this volume are unified by a conviction that important changes did occur in culture and society during the 1700s, and that they were linked dialogically with shifts in the ways emotions were experienced and valued.