ABSTRACT
Literary historians argue that the French revolution signalled the demise of the cult of sensibility; however, the connection of the novel with reality and its sympathetic effects was inherited by nineteenth-century realist fiction. This chapter examines two realist texts which are intensely preoccupied with sympathy, Honore de Balzac's Le Pere Goriot and George Eliot's 'The Lifted Veil'. It locates them between, on the one hand, the basic tenets of eighteenth-century discourses on sympathy and, on the other, the rejection of these tenets by Wilde, focusing on the roles ascribed to the reader, the fictional character and the author. Both works seem to subscribe to the close relation between sympathy, reality and fiction defined by eighteenth-century theories of sympathy; however, their overt claims to the sympathy of the reader are undermined and counteracted by another concept of eighteenth-century provenance, the 'sympathetic imagination' of the author.
