section_path: 18th-century novels/The sentimental novel
section_name: The sentimental novel
paragraph_text: The sentimental novel
  
  Sentimental novels relied on emotional responses, and feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than action. The result is a valorization of "fine feeling", displaying the characters as models of refined, sensitive emotional affect. The ability to display such feelings was thought at this time to show character and experience, and to help shape positive social life and relationships.
  
  An example of this genre is Samuel Richardson 's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), composed "to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes", which focuses on a potential victim, a heroine that has all the modern virtues and who is vulnerable because her low social status and her occupation as servant of a libertine who falls in love with her. She, however, ends in reforming her antagonist.
  
  Male heroes adopted the new sentimental character traits in the 1760s. Laurence Sterne 's Yorick, the hero of the Sentimental Journey (1768) did so with an enormous amount of humour. Oliver Goldsmith 's Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Henry Mackenzie 's Man of Feeling (1771) produced the far more serious role models.
  
  These works inspired a sub - and counterculture of pornographic novels, for which Greek and Latin authors in translations had provided elegant models from the last century. Pornography includes John Cleland 's Fanny Hill (1748), which offered an almost exact reversal of the plot of novels that emphasise virtue. The prostitute Fanny Hill learns to enjoy her work and establishes herself as a free and economically independent individual, in editions one could only expect to buy under the counter.
  
  Less virtuous protagonists can also be found in satirical novels, like Richard Head 's English Rogue (1665), that feature brothels, while women authors like Aphra Behn had offered their heroines alternative careers as precursors of the 19th-century femmes fatales.
  
  The genre evolves in the 1770s with, for example, Werther in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) realising that it is impossible for him to integrate into the new conformist society, and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) showing a group of aristocrats playing games of intrigue and amorality..