Aspectos claves y modernidad de la cultura sentimental del siglo XVIII.

Abstract

We would like to draw attention to some characteristics of the eighteenth century sentimental culture, which will be observed by means of its literary production, seen in an inclusive way that has its starting point in a work of the French classical age, Lettres portugaises, and reaches its high period in the 60s and 70s of the eighteenth century, when the works of Sterne, Goethe and Marmontel, among others, were published. Such characteristics, which are noticed as sharing an obvious relevance for the comtemporary period, would be: the interest for privacy and private spaces; the presence of a novelistic subculture, formed by women and young people who use this literary form to assert themselves and resist the least satisfying aspects of the hegemonic culture; the role of enlightened science (medicine, physiology, moral philosophy) and its new dualistic and materialistic trends in the creation of new concepts used in literature; and the importance of the issue of benevolence and its relationship with the wider notion of justice.