The paradigm of sensibility has had a lot of attention in the last twenty-five years, with important books by, among others, John Mullan (1988), Ann Jessie Van Sant (1993) Jerome McGann (The Poetics of Sensibility : A Revolution in Literary Style, 1996) and, more recently, Ildiko Csengei with her Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (2012).

            The ambivalent and fluctuating place of sensuality—the pursuit of physical, especially sexual, pleasure–within that physico-psychological model is illustrated by the shift in Mary Wollstonecraft’s work between Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798) : while sensuality is excluded from genuine sensibility in the earlier novel, it is an integral part of it in the latter.

            This one-day conference proposes to explore the account of the role of sensuality within a sensationalist epistemology, be it Lockean or Humean. The fields explored may include medicine, philosophy and literature. What are the various discursive strategies that attempt to fashion and put order into the disorder the senses can create, sources at once of pleasure, excess, pain and mistrust ? How is sensuality framed, is it given a cognitive function and how is it assigned a moral role ?  

Proposals (200-250 words) should be sent to Isabelle Bour Isabelle.Bour@univ-paris3.fr by 31st August, 2014.

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