• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.53
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• pp.219-249
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• 2018

This essay attempts a historical examination of educational function of the novel. It pays attention to the eighteenth century sentimentalism, and its historical vicissitudes up to early twenties century. The eighteenth century is the period in which debates on the nature of emotion and its moral and aesthetic role have passionately taken place and the modern paradigm of thought on affect has been formed. This is why "affect revival phenomenon" in the late twenties century goes back to this period. This essay finds in Adam Smith the most sophisticated arguments on sympathy in their relation to the development of the novel; it examines the relationship of Smith's argument with modern novel in the tradition of sentimentalism, and its revision in modernist novel. Through this examination, it discusses how cognitive and non-cognitive approaches, the two representative positions in contemporary thinking on emotion/affect, have revised and transformed the eighteenth century sentimentalism.