The Sentimental Novel and the Gothic
Many readers of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto are amused by the overwrought emotionalism of the novel; whenever I teach this work, many of my students find it so melodramatic as to be downright laughable — or utterly off-putting.
While such a reaction is understandable, what we risk overlooking in our mockery of Manfred's excesses (or Walpole's psychological clumsiness) is the fact that in this aspect of his novel, Walpole was not out-of-synch with his time. The middle decades of the C18 were the heyday of the sentimental novel (or "novel of sensibility," which isn't exactly the same thing), and in this popular form of fiction, displays of emotion which we sophisticated moderns find implausible, excessive, and psychologically unrealistic were the order of the day — were, in fact, the defining and expected characteristic of such works.
Why? These novels full of weeping and swooning and frequent displays of highly refined sensibilities are generally understood to be a reaction against the rationalism of the early to mid C18 — the (f)rigid world of Alexander Pope, John Dryden, etc. For the writers and readers of sentimental fiction, the world of emotion (closely allied to a world of moral reflection and virtue) was inadequately addressed in the works of mainstream Enlightenment writers.
Sentimental fiction has roots not only in this recognition of the importance of human emotion, but in philosopy as well; David Hume (in his Enquiry Concerning Human Morals and Treatise of Human Nature) and Adam Smith (in Theory of Moral Sentiments) are among the British philosophers of the early C18 who wrote on human emotion and its relation to moral virtue. The popularity of the novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with their emphasis on altruism, refined sensibilities, and benevolent feelings, further aided the development of an appetite for the literature of sensibility. Important to note, however, is that (until the Gothic, at least) this was not a literature of emotion for the sake of emotion, for self-indulgent expression, but a literature insistently moral and inescapably didactic.
Among the better-known works in the tradition of the sentimental novel are Samuel Richardson's Pamela [1740] and Clarissa Harlowe [1748] (important in their foregrounding of the heroine's persecution by a predatory male, which of course would become the driving engine of much Gothic fiction), Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey [1768] and Tristram Shandy [1767], Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield [1766], Henry MacKenzie's Man of Feeling [1771], even Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility [1811].
For more on the sentimental novel, see The Dictionary of Sensibility at UVa; this Wiki entry, and background notes for Charlotte Temple.
"The Sentimental Novel and the Gothic."