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
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Cites in this index (3)

  1. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  2. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  3. College English
Also cites 8 works outside this index ↓
  1. The Distinction of Fiction
  2. Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues
  3. Histories of Narrative Theory (II): From Structuralism to the Present
  4. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment
  5. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces
  6. The Nature of Narrative
  7. Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood
  8. “The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist-Narratological Reading of Persuasion
    ” Novel: A Forum on Fiction  
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