This chapter explores how Nietzsche’s shift towards a naturalistic methodology in the late 1870s offers him an axiological and epistemic apparatus that radically alters his philosophical articulation of pessimism, and consequently affects his attitude towards it. The chapter argues that contemporary Nietzsche scholarship has largely overlooked the importance of Human, All Too Human as a crucial stage of Nietzsche’s development in approaching the question of the value of existence. By exploring the influence of Paul Rée, Eugen Dühring, and the neo-Kantians, it introduces Nietzsche’s own ‘frame of reference’ argument against pessimism as a metaphysical view, and distinguishes between different possible interpretations of it.

The literary context of Tolstoy matters because his works not only emerged in concrete literary and historical circumstances, but expressed in their own ways shared concerns, ideas, fears, and aspirations, characteristic of the respective periods and, in particular, of the generation affected by the humiliating outcome of the Crimean War, the collapse of the decades-long isolationist conservative “scenario of power” of Nicholas I, and a series of forthcoming profound social and political reforms that changed the emotional and ideological outlook of Russian culture. The chapter primarily focuses on Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace within its actual literary and ideological contexts, including fierce contemporary debates on the most pressing issues of the 1860s, unleashed in powerful, tendentious “thick” journals. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s final sentence of the novel, the epistemological value of seeing Tolstoy in conversation with his contemporaries (Turgenev, Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Leskov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Grigoriev, Dmitry Pisarev, Surikov, Musorgsky, etc.) lies both in the renunciation of vision of his “unreal immobility in space” (generally taken for granted) and concurrently in the recognition of his dependence on other writers and literary contexts “of which we are unaware.” Gulliver is determined by his bonds.

This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

Storming the breaches of a fortress was the most perilous of military undertakings. After setting out the operational nature and challenges of British sieges in the Peninsular War, this chapter explores the cultural and emotional history of the British storming of besieged fortress-towns in the Napoleonic era, especially in Spain, revealing a cult and spectacle of storm that took hold in this epoch, borne of a reinvigoration of martial honour codes, ideals of heroic and patriotic self-sacrifice, and romantic and sublime sensibilities. British soldiers’ writings on their motivation for storming reveal a complex and interactive mix of remunerative incentives of promotion and plunder on the one hand, and bravery, esteem, honour and patriotism, on the other, with soldiers driven by both individual and collective values and loyalties. Further, this chapter analyses how soldiers managed fear and emotion in the impending eye of the storm, and the importance of sentimental culture in how they responded to the trauma and devastating loss of comrades in the aftermath.

In this essay, I chart a new origin story to counter popular understandings of the triumphalist, celebratory, northern- and abolitionist-centered origins of American animal welfare by providing underexplored historical context for the proslavery as well as antislavery origins of humane sentiment. I argue that humane carceral logics, or the rationale that surveillance, prosecution, and incarceration to protect animals through the legal system justified as well as pacified the means, ultimately produced coercive and discriminatory tools that naturalized white reformers’ heightened scrutiny of communities of color. I explore how white supremacy contributed to the formation of humane carceral logics by providing a historical study of carceral trends and the ways in which humane sentiment produced racial knowledge.

An overview of Steinbeck’s critical reputation that reasseses negative claims that Steinbeck is a middlebrow writer whose work is marked by unself-conscious nostalgia and sentimentalism. Turning to examples from The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Valley, the introduction argues that Steinbeck is a complex, varied, and experimental writer whose work is marked by metafiction and provocative contradiction that make it capable of unpacking and critically reexamining the very “faults” of which it is accused. Against claims that Steinbeck’s value lies in the past, I outline the many ways that his work is of urgent relevance today.

After an introductory discussion of Flaubert’s development as a writer and his direct experience (with Maxime Du Camp) of the February Revolution, this chapter focuses on his great novel, Sentimental Education. This novel is both the story of an unconsummated love affair and an account of the experience and imaginative life of the generation of young people who came to maturity around 1840 and whose lives were either broken or redirected by the revolution of 1848. Our analysis emphasizes the care taken by Flaubert to establish a counterpoint between the collapse of political ideals in 1848 and the collapse of the dreams of the individual characters. The novel is considered as a work of history and compared to the work of historians like Georges Duveau and Maurice Agulhon. A number of specific scenes and vignettes are discussed in an attempt to show how Flaubert brings the past to life. We conclude with a discussion of Bouvard and Pecuchet, which includes a chapter on the revolution of 1848 as it affected a village in Normandy. Though written in an overtly comic vein, this chapter reinforces the picture offered by Sentimental Education of history as ruled by elemental forces that overwhelm the plans of individuals.

After a general discussion of the experience of proscription, exile, and “internal exile,” we follow each of our nine writers into exile, retirement, or a new life. We then compare their assessments of particular events and individuals: notably the prison massacres during the June Days and the portraits of Auguste Blanqui and Adolphe Thiers. We turn to three themes: 1) the religiosity that pervaded the language of the ‘forty-eighters; 2) the repeated recourse to theatrical language and imagery to describe both the course of events and the tendency of revolutionaries to mimic the words, deeds and gestures of the first French revolutionaries; 3)the cult of “the people” elaborated as a source of democratic legitimacy by some of our writers and criticized by others. In conclusion, I maintain that in their effort to explain the failure of the democratic republic in 1848–1852, our writers raise questions that continue to concern us. Their central concern was the problem of democracy. When, and how, would the people be able to govern themselves? How was it that in the space of two generations democratic revolutions had twice culminated in Napoleonic dictatorship? There are worse questions to ask if we are to begin to understand the failures of democratic politics in our own time.

Chapter 9 focuses on the two chapters that go missing near the end of the novel, where Uncle Toby is finally able to acknowledge his love for Widow Wadman but only, it seems, with a Bible open to the book of Joshua, the passage about the siege of Jericho. Why this passage? And why does Sterne purposefully misnumber and rearrange these chapters of his novel? The mock fortifications that Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim build together, those replicas of military sieges happening in Europe, work in the novel as metaphors for the ways that all books – whether philosophy, scripture, or fiction – can both distance us from difficult intimate relationships and make room to repair them.

Sentimentalism in eighteenth-century Scottish literature reflected the ideas of moral philosophers like Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith, who argued that our sense of morality has its origins in feelings aroused by impressions conveyed by the senses. The influence of Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator, an imaginary witness and judge of human interactions, is evident in novels by Henry Mackenzie and Tobias Smollett, whose characters’ emotional responses to scenes of suffering are described in great detail. In theatre, John Homes’ Douglas was deemed a success by the amount of tears shed by the audience, while Joanna Baillie’s plays dramatised moral sentiments by illustrating particular vices and virtues. Macpherson’s Ossianic poems became an international sensation through their nostalgic sentimentalism, which depicted the pure and noble virtues of a bygone era. Sentimentalism in the poetry of Robert Burns celebrates both individual subjectivity and common humanity through his treatment of universal themes like love and nature. Unlike the Romantic movement that would follow it, which tended to privilege individual autonomy and subjectivity over sociability, sentimentalism in Scottish literature depicted individuals as social beings whose sensibility was stimulated and defined by their interactions with others.