ABSTRACT
On the surface, Sensibility’s redefi nition of authorship is, like the reclamation of Genesis, associated with a reaction against centralized authority,
rational ordering, and the synoptic presence of an omniscient author/narrator.2 Authors and their narrators begin adopting a more democratic approach to authorship, at least rhetorically. As Sterne’s Tristram speaks of “halving the matter amicably” with his readers, Mackenzie claims to favor placing “the Pencil into their [the readers’] own Hands.”3 Such gestures indicate the desire to raise the affective powers of the work and emphasize the new dignity in uncensored human passions and “internal” sources of authority, whether in the form of Sterne’s “Great Sensorium,” Mackenzie’s “feeling heart,” Goethe’s “wunderbare Empfi ndung,” or Smith’s “great Demigod within the breast.” Sensibility’s concern about authorship naturally affects and refl ects concern about human relations with the divine--in particular, the authority and authorship of God-- both as “Author” of our being and as author of the “Book of Nature.”4 As the culture of sensibility adapts Genesis to reclaim the aesthetics of irregularity while also relying on the authority of an older tradition, its authors also try to reclaim a form of authorship that can allow for the tenets of its moral aesthetic-including authenticity and spontaneity in the absence of a central controlling voice.
