Sentimentalism

As a literary mode, sentimentalism is the practice of treating emotion and feeling, rather than reason, as the basis for a person's actions and reactions, and it recurs throughout the history of world literature. It covers a range of literary forms, including sentimental poetry, the sentimental novel, and the German sentimentalist music movement known as Empfindsamkeit. European literary sentimentalism arose during the Age of Enlightenment, in part as a response to sentimentalism in philosophy, and in eighteenth century England the sentimental novel became a major literary genre, developing there between 1730 and 1780 before spreading to other European literatures. Its philosophical grounding came chiefly from Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, a pupil of John Locke.