THE TREND OF SENTIMENTALISM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Sentimentalism is a practice of being sentimental, and thus tending toward basing actions and reactions upon emotions and feelings. As a literary mode, sentimentalism has been a recurring aspect of world literature. Sentimentalism includes a variety of aspects in literature, such as sentimental poetry, the sentimental novel, and the German sentimentalist music movement, European literary sentimentalism arose during the Age of Enlightenment, partly as a response to sentimentalism in philosophy. In eighteenth-century England, the sentimental novel was a major literary genre. Its philosophical basis primarily came from Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, a pupil of John Locke. This trend of literature considers the process of ideas, images and plots drawn from the literatures of the East, to which they were exposed by the uniqueness of the philosophical and aesthetic consciousness of the 18th century.