UC Berkeley

"Experiencing the Novel: The Genre of Tender Conscience" argues that a seismic shift in perceptions of sensitivity reshaped the political realm and gave to literary history a new aesthetic form. Scholars of the eighteenth century have long distinguished the novel from earlier prose fiction by the verisimilitude of its circumstantial details. This scholarly tradition has yielded an unexpected critical silence on the extraordinary character at the novel’s center: a hyperconscious narrator who instantaneously and perpetually transforms perceptions into ordered, written narrative. This project traces the origins of this endlessly impressionable figure to the English Revolution, when the “tender conscience” was invented. Initially conceived of as a spiritual sensitivity to sin, this ideal soon became a shared political principle. For those who publicly self-identified as “tender consciences,” even minor episcopal revisions to liturgical practice induced excruciating pain. Through their declarations of sensitivity, these citizens appealed to a Pauline theory of community formation and its vision of a collective body that reforms for the sake of the most vulnerable within it. By discovering their own tenderness, the subjects of Charles I discovered political voices. Indeed, the tender conscience, as an affective logic and moral language of resistance, ultimately justified regicide. A forceful, community-binding complex of cognition, feeling, and ethics, the tender conscience persists well into the eighteenth century: it is the affective epistemology that drives Enlightenment thought from Lockean empiricism to Smithean sentimentalism. The tender conscience posited the public privilege of sensitivity; John Locke redirected and extended its reach. As it unfolds a vision of the long seventeenth century, this project reveals an enduring culture of dissent whose powerful recalibrations of affective norms shape popular politics, philosophy—and the culture of sensibility itself—from the margins.