ABSTRACT
Some novels are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them. William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy-a rather slight, youthful, and derivative performance-is not a part of any ‘great tradition’ or canon of ‘great books’. Whatever status it has in literary history stems mainly from the circumstances of its early reception, when it came to be recognised as the first novel to be published after the ratification of the US Constitution. The timing of its appearance has been its main claim to fame. Nonetheless, for the topic of transatlantic enlightenment, Hill’s novel is worth a closer look. As a novel of sentiment, it speaks directly to what the editors of this volume have described as its central problem. This is, they say, the challenge of reconciling the two diverging recent views of enlightenment: on the one hand, a set of enlightenments understood as locally bounded phenomena (French, Scottish, American); on the other hand, enlightenment as a broadly transatlantic phenomenon, with features displayed in common around much of the so-called Atlantic Rim. ‘Sentiment’ itself-like its close cousin ‘opinion’—developed into an eighteenth-century concept that to a degree reflected this double valence. Sentiments, like opinions, are local, personal. But sentiment, like opinion, is sharable throughout nations and publics, even between nations and publics. The Power of Sympathy self-consciously stages its narrative performance not only in respect to the British sentimental novel but also in respect to the British sentimental novel’s relation to its continental counterpart. This is a part of the novel’s claim on our attention here.
