고려대학교

초록/요약

Although literary history has attempted overwrite and erase amatory fiction of earlier eighteenth-century women novelists, many elements of this popular genre were rewoven into the more elevated novels and became integral part of the English novel. In this paper, I argue that widely divergent as they may seem the sentimental novel and amatory fiction share much in common. I attempt to show how the eroticized body of Haywood’s amatory fiction is not far different from the sensitized body of the sentimental novel and the pleasures to be had from reading the two types of novel stand much closer in nature than is generally supposed. I have taken as my examplary text Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719). Both types of novels are built on a series of scenes in which the eroticized/sensitized body is displayed before the onlooker, and in order to describe this body, Haywood makes extensive use of words and expressions which later became key terms in the novels of sensibility. Love in Excess sees the feminization and reformation of the male hero from a libertine to a sentimentalized lover, and love becomes to amatory fiction what active sympathy is to the novel of sentiment. I attempt to establish the link between erotic arousal and emotional arousal and argue how these reactions are fundamentally similar in that they form part of what has been called the eroticized reading process, which laid the novel open not only to the popularity it increasingly enjoyed but also to censure.