If The Castle Of Otranto formulated the Gothic as a combination of romance iconography and psychological realism, then The Mysteries Of Udolpho elaborates it by adding naturalistic and mechanistic explanation, and presenting its heroine as a cusp between late sixteenth-century supernaturalism, and the Enlightenment rationality capable of demystifying it. That said, supernaturalism is merely deflected, rather than removed, into some of the most extraordinary prose descriptions of landscape in the language, as the three properties around which the narrative revolves, allow Radcliffe to effectively novelise Burke's Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, as well as supplement it with her own more idiosyncratic distinction between terror and horror. In the process, she proposes a political economy of sentiment, in which sensibility that exceeds its use-value - namely, its ability to encourage acts of charity and beneficence - is deflected and restructured into a contemplative immersion in sublime and beautiful landscapes, frequently described as a convent, or church: "How can the poor nuns and friars feel the full fervor of devotion, if they never see the sun rise, or set?" At its strongest, this collapses eye and object into a single, immersive medium that renders every object continuous; or, alternatively, ensures that the ultimate object of perception is an elusive, ambient haze, murk, gloom, or other sensory horizon, encapsulated in the drifts of music that haunt the edges of every scene, all of which contributes to subjectify the natural world, presenting it as a melancholy, mnemonic, romantic repository; a chill sombience, suspended in a jewelled, trembling tear.

Less an application of than an affective supplement to Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Caleb Williams elaborates a theory of sensibility, sublimity and revolutionary consciousness, in which the sensible and insensible aristocrat no longer stand in a dichotomous but a dialectical relationship to one another, their respective preoccupations with oppression and reputation revealed to be manifestations of the same sublime 'vengeance'. In the process, the deindividuation, or deidentification, characteristic of the sublime is reconfigured in terms of total class identification, as the persecution of Caleb by Squire Falkland takes both on a veritable tour of their respective privileges and constrictions, as well as presenting them as the thesis and antithesis of the synthesis that in fact begins and propels the narrative - Squire Tyrrel's extraordinary, Miltonic-Satanic 'resentment', which surely forms the raw material for the utopian, proto-anarchist society that Godwin envisages ("Energy is perhaps of all qualities the most beneficial; and a just political system would possess the means of extracting from it...its beneficial qualities"), as well as Caleb's moment of awakening: "...I felt as if my animal system had undergone a total revolution. My blood boiled within me. I was conscious to a kind of rapture to which I could not account." Although this unusual synthesis means the work occasionally veers more towards an apocalyptic individualism, it remains the first great novel of insensibility, in which the sensible, affective mobility of previous eighteenth-century writers is replaced with a plea for structural reform; the Gothic is presented as a direct consequence of English land law, rather than a voyeuristic, exotic, Catholic Europe (concomitantly, Godwin redeems the prison from its role as centrepiece of early novelistic voyeurism); the mystery novel is effectively invented as a way of elaborating how aristocratic self-effacement simply veils a more violent, lower-class effacement; and, most extraordinarily, Caleb's quest for insensibility briefly produces a mindscape that exceeds even Rousseau in its expansive, mnemonic mechanics - revolutionary consciousness as a revelation of the existence of individual consciousness - as well as an affirmation of the mind's ability to affect the material world and, by extension, the revolutionary materiality of the mind itself. 

One of the most accomplished slave narratives, Olaudah Equiano's autobiography describes his acquisition of a hermeneutic literacy that is successively figured in poetic, religious and economic terms; poetically, as an increasing tendency to read Milton's Satan as a cipher for his own indescribable "astonishment" at being hurled from his African family into the depths of the slave trade; religiously, as a configuration of his bondage, thwarted attempts at escape, and eventual freedom around the Dissenting vocabularies of predestination, Providence and the exclusivity of the elect; and economically, as an ability to graduate from an object to an advocate of the free market, his final, most categorical denunciation of slavery conducted on the basis that it is not "trading upon safe grounds". This centres an otherwise fairly episodic, digressive combination of captivity, adventure and travel motifs in a typological logic that culminates with Equiano's designation of himself as common denominator between the lapsed Judaism of his African ancestors, and the primitive Christianity emulated by the Dissenters, and their Quaker relatives; or, alternatively, in a series of deliverances extrapolated from Psalm 107, and structured around the inflammatory power of language, which allow Equiano to graduate from blasphemy, to the journal that is presumably the prototype for the autobiography itself and, finally, to the fusion of personal and biblical language expressed in the exhortative poem that commemorates his conversion. In the end, the centrality of this conversion, and its tension between the importance of individual election, and insignificance of individual works, shifts the emphasis from the plight of the slave to that of the ostensibly freed slave, and the register from exhortation to emulation, as Equiano offers himself as a kind of navigational guide to a social mulattism whose very proximity to protection and sanction throws all its complications, inconsistencies and disingenuities into painfully exquisite relief.

A far more elegant philosophical-sentimental novel than Julie, The Sorrows Of Young Werther fuses discursion and sentiment into the voice of Nature - or, at least, its conduit, as evinced in Werther's constant regret that he stands between the reader and his own objects of perception and description. Not only does this make it one of the first novels to deal with an unreliable, or at least inadequate narrator - let alone in which the object of inadequate narration is that narrator - but it atomises the 'book' into those organic, perishable fragments so precious to the proto-romantics. Given that these correspond to the canon of natural and inanimate objects that Werther feels compelled to ceremonially remember, Sorrows ultimately confirms that the sheer act of writing, and encountering writing - especially in the confessional mode outlined here, Confessions' most immediate forerunner - is inherently melancholy, retrospective and, above all, morbid, with Werther's suicide drawing attention to a textual as much as a theological limitation. From this perspective, the genius of Goethe's authorial voice lies in its invocation of a subject that, at his most solipsistic, seems to lose the use of language altogether and, at his most eloquent, is capable of summoning up sufficient ekphrastic power to elide himself in the name of a series of extraordinary, proto-romantic tableaux, fusing his pen with the paintbrush that represents his true artistic calling. This fusion of introspection and extroversion, again, recalls Julie, and provides the most elegant instance of the pathetic fallacy in the novel to date, if only because the correlation between Werther's perpetual uncertainty and meterological flux is so inevitable as to shift that uncertainty to the meaning of the correlation itself, producing the ambiguity that is one of the novel's key registers, and the symptom of Werther's futile efforts to escape the projections of his pathological 'sensibility'.

One of the clearest bridges between 'sensibility' and romanticism, The Man Of Feeling is effectively a series of voyeuristic, sentimental tableaux; a proudly anti-intellectual appeal to the erotic frisson of tears. Not only is the first conversation about political machination disrupted by an appeal to sentiment, and Bedlam - the quintessential eighteenth century voyeuristic space - figured as the logical conclusion of academic, scientific, economic and political discourse, but the one sustained account of government is immediately fragmented, part elided, part attributed to a subsequent redactor of the work. This makes Mackenzie's nebulous appeals to 'equality' somewhat halfhearted, but does gesture towards the novel's more enduring affective kernel; namely, its melancholy prescience of the disposability and mortality of the printed word itself. Opening with the discovery of the work proper in a romantic ruin, and marked attention to its decaying incompletion ("no more a history than it is a sermon"), Mackenzie uses what little narrative remains as the mere pretext for a series of transitory written and verbal gestures. These correspond to the unnamed protagonist's retreat to the country, culminating with the doggerel that he finds scrawled on the walls and furniture of an old inn and, finally, the pastoral poetic fragment that he finds carelessly attached to a rustic domestic implement, and which, written at nature's command, and quoted in its entirety, could be taken as a rough prototype for the whole romantic school: "As I talk I have seen her recline/With an aspect so pensively sweet/Tho' I spoke what the shepherds opine/A fop were ashamed to repeat."

If Tristram Shandy's authorial voice subordinated sympathetic to empirical immediacy - the writer, sitting alone in his room, sharing his mistakes and contingencies with the reader - A Sentimental Journey identifies travel literature as the genre in which this dissociation is best taken to its logical and comic conclusion. To this end, Sterne draws upon the travel narrative that constitutes Tristram Shandy's most contiguous, incongruous chapter, to explicate 'immediacy' as a highly associative, if not implicitly materialistic, succession of sensations, incapable of being arranged into anything more than the fragments that constitute this new narrative - or, rather, replace it, achieving the series of pure digressions that Tristram Shandy envisaged and, in the process, suggesting that travel literature is less indebted to the novel's rich genealogy of eccentric 'systems' as to the much wider, more amorphous, canon of half-baked thoughts - let alone provide any kind of sustained or insightful commentary upon people, places or customs, or the philosophical and political speculation that might be expected to result from them. By taking the sentimental traveller to this extremity, Sterne presents him as a figure whose sensations are so intense, atomised and narcissistic that he ultimately sees nothing, subsuming himself into his own armchair readership; a fusion of reader, writer and traveller that is beautifully encapsulated in the same mechanistic approach to the body that characterised Tristram Shandy, but with a heightened attention to the fingers that open the narrative with a direct message from the author, are used as synecdoches for all its major incidents, and culminate with a mistaken clasp in the dark that is sufficiently shocking for the writer to conclude mid-sentence - and, in its original incarnation, to lead the reader's own finger directly to the end-page. If Tristram Shandy was obsessed with the conventions of the page, A Sentimental Journey is obsessed with the conventions of the cover, in each case because they find themselves unable or unwilling to submit to, enjoy, or comprehend them.

The Castle Of Otranto would be underwhelming, were it not for Walpole's delightfully articulate, genuinely modest preface, in which he characterises the work as concisely as any critic; generally, as a gesture of originality, rather than genius and, specifically, as an attempt to fuse the romance tradition with the novel's greater focus on psychological realism, elaborating the reactions of ordinary people to extraordinary events in a way that effectively sets the stage for all subsequent horror literature. To this end, Walpole draws particular attention to his comic use of 'lower' characters - and his invocation of Shakespeare seems less a claim for his own canonicity than a tacit acknowledgment of the inherent theatricality of the work which, organised around five act-like chapters, largely composed of dialogue, and preoccupied with the kinds of spectacles that might render a playhouse incredulous, frequently feels like little more than a script, or transcript, in keeping with Walpole's playful speculations about its origins. For this reason, his transformation of a series of prototypical romantic spaces - the castle, convent, woods, caves - into a Gothic register is more rudimentary than their foundational status might suggest, while his intricate, incestual family drama is a little too mechanical to exploit the logical, tortuous conclusion of feminine 'sympathy' that will subsequently suffuse the genre.

Rameau's Nephew is the most novelistic of Diderot's philosophical dialogues, largely because its sceptical voice - Jean-Francois Rameau ('He'), nephew of the notorious composer, with whom Diderot ('I') enjoys an extended conversation in the Tuileries - is a character, rather than a mouthpiece; or, rather, is imbued with a multifarious, prosopopoeic intensity that transforms every utterance into a nascent narrative, anticipating the dead ends of Jacques The Fatalist. As a result, the various objects of discursion - education, epistemology, aesthetics, commerce - are ultimately subordinated to a rhythmic rehearsal, catharsis and expulsion of the philosophical stance itself, as if the most entertaining defense of Diderot's encyclopedic materialism were a taxonomic reduction of all its opponents to so many behavioural deformities. This may explain the privileged role ascribed to musicology as the culmination of all these argumentative strands - and, more specifically, Rameau's insistence on the replacement of baroque proportions and pedantries with the maxim that "it is the animal cry of passion that should dictate the melodic line...phrases must be short and the meaning self-contained, so that the musician can utilise the whole and every part...turning it all ways like a polyp, without destroying it."

Just as the novel starts to glimpse itself as a legitimate, independent subcategory of literature, Tristram Shandy removes it to the foot of an interminable genealogy of syncretic, interdisciplinary, picaresque "systems", thereby subsuming its privileged mode of individuated, sympathetic immersion into one of collaborative, pseudo-ceremonial, crypto-exposition, and focusing all its attention on those remaining hinges between authorial visibility and invisibility that, in previous and contemporary novels, tend to be relegated to the tactful distance of prefaces, opening chapters, and opening paragraphs. In fact, Sterne's masterpiece is little more than an extended preface, in which Tristram's attempt to tell his life in accordance with Locke's Essay Upon Human Understanding - the most recent and reputable of these systems, along with Don Quixote, and, to a lesser extent, the works of Burton and Rabelais - requires an ever-more expansive, incidental and, above all, retrospective collation of facts, expanding these hinges into the digressions that Sterne considered his most enduring signature, and ensuring that the narrative never progresses beyond the first day of Tristram's life, with the exception of a travel interlude that lays the foundations for A Sentimental Journey. In particular, Sterne's taste for medical speculation translates every "system" into an anatomy, producing a hyperbolic delineation of the most incidental bodily attitudes or positions, and an unprecedented dissection of the material constituents of the book itself, as the various organs that compose the page - ink, typography, formatting, the awareness of preceding and succeeding pages - are isolated and displayed. It feels as if Sterne ultimately wants to place the reader in a position where their body - and especially their eyes - cuckold their brain, just as his proportionate attention to the organic, genealogical character of words themselves perpetually cuckolds any attempt at sustained discourse, whether on his own part or that of his characters; a reduction of epistemology to fortification, and pedagogy to the tabulation of auxiliary verbs.

Rasselas, Prince Of Abissinia explicates wisdom literature as an inherently negative genre, an attempt to curb the excesses of imagination, exhortation and ratiocination, by positioning itself somewhere between poetry, theology and natural philosophy; that is, as a fundamentally unsatisfying genre and, therefore, the most appropriate to evoke - if not systematise, let alone solve - the paradoxical nature of desire, and structural impossibility of its fulfillment. Structuring his rudimentary narrative around his protagonist's escape from a sheltered, "happy valley", in search of the dissatisfaction that will sharpen satisfaction, Johnson ensures that his exquisite descriptions and elaborations of places, people and customs are always curbed or attenuated just when they seem on the verge of the exotic revelations of travel literature. In the same way, the various allegories, examples and lessons encountered on the course of this journey tend to be short, elliptical and inconclusive, while his taste for aphoristic pronouncement is both interrogated ("the emptiness of rhetorical sound and the inefficacy of polished sentences") and only indulged when it is it's own object. The resultant sense of self-referentiality, or redundancy, reflects the financial necessity under which Johnson wrote, and suggests that the final, unusually pointed argument against materialism is more about the materiality of language than of substance; or, alternatively, that the pervasive association of solitude with trauma stems from the former's ability to gradually denaturalise language, as evinced in the episode where Rasselas and his companions encounter an astronomer who has retreated into an insane conversation with the clouds. The latter also gestures towards a trauma peculiar to the individuated, sympathetic immersion of the novel reader, pathologising the entire genre as an instance of the omniscient imagination that turns desire into its own object, and suggesting that Johnson's distinctively anti-imaginative statement should ultimately be read aloud, or in some other collective or ceremonial fashion; or, alternatively, that the childish world of pure wish-fulfillment from which Rasselas flees is that of the emergent novel itself.