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The Story within the Story of Sentimental Fiction

Why are scenes of storytelling so central to sentimental fiction in late eighteenth-century Britain? Shifts in narrative level, where a character tells their story—most often of tragic loss—to another character, are as familiar to readers of sentimental fiction as the tears its heroes and heroines shed. This essay analyzes the typical structure of embedding in a range of sentimental novels, including Man of Feeling, David Simple, History of Emily Montague, and Millenium Hall, in order to show how narrative exchanges most often involve the exchange of money and moral feeling. The “narrative of a narrative” that embedded stories tell concerns the historical tensions between virtue and commerce at a nascent moment in the history of capitalism and scenes of storytelling work to manage capitalism’s foundational contradiction between use value and exchange value. The essay ultimately demonstrates how stories-within-stories in sentimental novels are, themselves, embedded within capitalism’s system of exchange.