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On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. For the American cultural magazine, see Sentimentalist Magazine. This article possibly contains original research. Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but in current usage the term commonly connotes a reliance on shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason. Sentimentalism in philosophy is a view in meta-ethics according to which morality is somehow grounded in moral sentiments or emotions. A sentimentalist”, Oscar Wilde wrote, “is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sends Buck Mulligan a telegram that reads “The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.

By the close of the century, however, a reaction had occurred against what had come to be considered sentimental excess, by then seen as false and self-indulgent—especially after Schiller’s 1795 division of poets into two classes, the “naive” and the “sentimental”—regarded respectively as natural and as artificial. Sentimentality often involves situations which evoke very intense feelings: love affairs, childbirth, death”, but where the feelings are expressed with “reduced intensity and duration of emotional experiencediluted to a safe strength by idealisation and simplification”. There is also the issue of what has been called “indecent sentimentality pornographical pseudo-classics”, so that one might say for example that “Fanny Hill is a very sentimental novel, a faked Eden”. In a “subjective confession” of 1932, Ulysses: a Monologue, the analytic psychologist Carl Jung anticipates Baudrillard when he writes: “Think of the lamentable role of popular sentiment in wartime!

The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality. Complications enter into the ordinary view of sentimentality, however, when changes in fashion and setting— the “climate of thought”—intrude between the work and the reader. Recent feminist theory has clarified the use of the term as it applies to the genre” of the sentimental novel, stressing the way that ‘different cultural assumptions arising from the oppression of women gave liberating significance to the works’ piety and mythical power to the ideals of the heroines”.

The sentimental fallacy is an ancient rhetorical device that attributes human emotions, such as grief or anger, to the forces of nature. Richards gave just such a quantitative definition: “a response is sentimental if it is too great for the occasion. He added, “We cannot, obviously, judge that any response is sentimental in this sense unless we take careful account of the situation. Jay Michael Dickson, “Defining the Sentamentalist in Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 44, Number 1, Fall 2006, pp. Sentimental began to accrue negative connotations in the 19th century. Wilkie took the example of Henry Clay Work’s maudlin lyric of Temperance propaganda, “Come Home, Father”. Tony Blair, as quoted in Wheen, p.

Ian Robinson, as quoted in Anderson and Mullen, p. Introduction to A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne. Anderson, Digby, and Peter Mullen, eds. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Emerging Visions of the Aesthetic Process: Psychology, Semiology, and Philosophy.