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The Columbia History of the British NovelWhat is most benign about time in the bildungsroman-its efficacy as agent of growth and development-becomes in the sentimental novel its most malign feature: the power of time to transform boys into men and sons into husbands is the very thing that the sentimental novel tries to elude or deny. We tend to think of the language of sentimentalism as an affected or exaggerated jargon: "tears and flapdoodle," as Mark Twain was to call it. Yet what is most characteristic of sentimentalism is not the set of terms with which it attempts to revivify the language of emotion, for these terms quickly dwindle into cliches, but rather a fundamental skepticism about the adequacy of language itself as a medium of expression or communication. The distinctive sentimental attitude toward language is to be discovered not in the shibboleths of its pioneers but in the conviction of sentimentalists of each generation that language, like the world that uses it, is profoundly debased: better suited to self-disguise than self-revelation, more often employed to exploit than to enlighten, ideally to be avoided but at all events to be used, if used it must be, with mistrust ...» |
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