Eighteenth‐Century British Literature and Hostile Feelings

ABSTRACT This is a state‐of‐the‐field essay on scholarship on hostile feelings in eighteenth‐century British literature. While it is impossible to say whether eighteenth‐century Britain was especially hostile, feelings such as hatred, contempt, and resentment energized the print market and attracted significant philosophical and religious discussion in the period. Literary studies of hate have appeared sporadically since the mid twentieth century, most notably D. W. Harding's seminal essay on Austen, “Regulated Hatred” (1940), but in the past 25 years literary scholars have given increasing attention to hostile feelings, broadly understood, in reaction to influential scholarship on eighteenth‐century discourses of politeness, sympathy, and sensibility. The essay begins with a discussion of the history of emotions, by now a large and complex field. It then describes the ongoing turn against politeness in historical and literary studies, and reviews scholarship on hostilities in eighteenth‐century satire and novels.