In the 18th century, English society experiences profound structural and mental changes that deepen the gap between the public and private spheres and call for a new ethical system. Sentimentalism and culture of sensibility are formed as a reaction to the moral anxiety of individualized society: sentiment understood as a moral feeling becomes a potential social bond that would unite individuals in a sympathetic community. This undergraduate thesis adopts a socio-literary approach to explain the rise of the novel not only as a literary, but also social phenomenon, contingent upon changes in perception of an individual, their body, spirituality, sociability as well as upon the spreading consumerism and literary market. It endeavours to grasp sentimental novel as one part of a much wider social and ethical reformation that seeks to promote the sentiment as the highest moral authority. Novel in the 18th century is consciously formed as a new genre of its own age that would re-establish threatened sociability through identification with the virtuous hero(ine)s. The pioneering English novelists Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney and Laurence Sterne, who represent with their innovative narrative strategies three stages in the development of the sentimental novel, try to balance its serious didactic role with readership's newly discovered taste for emotional excitement. Taking into consideration different aspects of social and intellectual life, the thesis aims to reconstruct the historical perspective of the 18th-century readers to recover the original meaning and social role of the sentimental novel.
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