The representation of the male character's pathetic in european sentimental novel: a study on literary imagery

This work presents an analysis of the representation of the male characters’ pathetic in the so-called sentimental novel of the eighteenth century in Europe, about all in English, French, German and Italian literatures. The main thesis of the work is the derivation of the pathetic of the einghteenth century novel from religious preaching practice of the previous century and consequently of the sentimental novel’s normative value. Sentimental literature seems to have token the place of ancient conduct books and define itself as a set of behavioural exempla adapted to different situations of life. We followed the historical evolutions of the novel throughout a thematic analysis of the motif of male tears. In order to do so, we examined the complexe gestural expressiveness of the representation of emotions and the resulting diegesis, which we can define, according to a recent terminology, as touching, sentimental or spectacular pathetic. This lead to include different artistic forms, from theater to painting. The methodology used here conjugate the history of ideas and the study of imagery, pathetic being a concept belonging to philosophical studies as well as to artistic representation : the concept passed during the eighteenth century from a stylistic and rhetoric dimension to an aesthetic and anthropological one. The works has been divided in three parts, analysing three fondamental anthropological dimensions of human existence : religious imagery and cultural heritage from the past, that is the relationships between the period considered and previous cultural tradition ; the imagery of love, focused on love and sexual relationships between the sexes and on the « feminisation » of male characters in sentimental novels ; familial imagery, which concentrates on the consequences of this change in the reprentation of masculinity on the context of familial and intergenerational relationships representation.