Esther Yu is an assistant professor of English at Stanford University. Her work ranges across the poetry and prose of the early modern period through the eighteenth century, focusing particularly on the history of the emotions, popular politics, and traditions of religious dissent.
SHC Project
Experiencing the Novel: The Genre of Tender Conscience
Experiencing the Novel: The Genre of Tender Conscience traces the origins of the early British novel’s hyperconscious narrator to the English Revolution and its invention of the “tender conscience.” First conceived as a sensitivity to sin, this spiritual ideal became a shared political principle in the 1640s. For those who publicly self-identified as “tender consciences,” even minor episcopal impositions induced unbearable pain. By discovering their tenderness, the subjects of Charles I acquired political voices; as an affective logic and moral language of resistance, this conscience ultimately justified regicide. A community-binding complex of cognition, feeling, and ethics, the tender conscience persists into the eighteenth century as the affective epistemology that drives Enlightenment thought from Lockean empiricism to Smithean sentimentalism. As it unfolds a vision of the long seventeenth century, Experiencing the Novel reveals an enduring culture of dissent whose recalibrations of affective norms shape popular politics, philosophy—and the culture of sensibility itself—from the margins.