ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century sensibility has been variously dubbed an 'institution' (Taine), an 'epidemie' (Monglond), an 'age' or 'ere sensible' (Frye, Van Tieghem), a cult or indeed culture, a 'physiological doctrine', 'literary movement' and 'discourse', a 'literary and social phenomenon', a 'conceptual and cultural construct', and a 'New Orthodoxy'. The recuperation of sensibility as an eighteenth-century fashion in social manners is characteristic of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts. Andre Monglond provides an interesting case study of the 'preromantisme' thesis insofar as his heavily rhetoricized argument exaggerates tendencies also present in more measured accounts. Pierre Trahard's weighty four-volume compendium on sensibility the first full-length study in French devoted to the subject, is an immediate response to Monglond's thesis, and to his sidelining of 'ames sensibles' in favour of 'heros preromantiques'. The fixing of dates for the emergence of 'sensibility', and of its origins, continues to provoke disagreement.
