Abstract

ABSTRACT This article presents the case that the perspective on taste set forth in Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres significantly influenced Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility. Austen’s version of the Scots’s concepts—sense, sensibility, understanding, feeling, delicacy, correctness, and so forth—features the tendency in individuals of taste to favor either sense or sensibility, as well as the novelist’s decided tilt toward the former. Despite her inclination toward sense, however, Austen ultimately follows Blair in characterizing these faculties as complementary and cooperative, rather than competitive or oppositional. Just as Lectures provides potential insight into Sense and Sensibility, so, correspondingly, study of Austen’s novel provides a better understanding of Blair and his influence.

Journal
Advances in the History of Rhetoric
Published
2015-01-02
DOI
10.1080/15362426.2014.1000550
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (0)

No articles in this index cite this work.

References (46) · 3 in this index

  1. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  2. Sense and Sensibility
  3. Northanger Abbey
  4. “Blair’s Rhetoric and the Art of Persuasion
    ” Persuasions
  5. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Reading Character in Sense and Sensibility
    Persuasions On-Line
Show all 46 →
  1. Strictures on Female Education; Chiefly as It Relates to the Culture of Heart, in Four Essays
  2. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1085
  3. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present
  4. On the Duties of the Young
  5. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
  6. Lectures on Rhetoric: Abridged Chiefly from Dr. Blair’s Lectures on That Science
  7. On Sensibility
  8. The Rhetoric of Fiction
  9. Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition
  10. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed
  11. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas
  12. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  13. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film
  14. The Distinction of Fiction
  15. Introduction
  16. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels
  17. Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues
  18. Introduction
  19. Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present
  20. An Inquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex
  21. A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters
  22. Elements of Criticism
  23. Of the Standard of Taste
  24. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment
  25. Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style
  26. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces
  27. Jane Austen: A Life
  28. “Sentimental Journey: The Place and Status of the Emotions in Hugh Blair’s Rhetoric
  29. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology
  30. Jane Austen’s Experiment in Narrative Comedy: The Beginning and Early Middle of Persuasion.
  31. A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity
  32. The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen
  33. The Nature of Narrative
  34. The Conversable World: Eighteenth-Century Transformations of the Relation of Rhetoric and Truth
  35. Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood
  36. Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation
  37. Jane Austen: A Life
  38. Austen’s Oughts: Judgment after Locke and Shaftesbury
  39. College English
  40. “The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist-Narratological Reading of Persuasion
    ” Novel: A Forum on Fiction  
  41. The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and Its French Antecedents