Life’s Progress through the Passions

Abstract

“THUS have I attempted to trace nature in all her mazy windings, and shew life’s progress thro’ the passions, from the cradle to the grave,” remarks the narrator on the closing pages of Haywood’s Life’s Progress through the Passions: or, The Adventures of Natur a (1748). 1 Although written 24 years after she left the Hillarian circle, this novel is a good place to begin an examination of Haywood’s desire to find a language for the passions. It offers a hybridized language, as Haywood incorporates various discourses (philosophical, scientific, moral, and didactic) and genres like the parable, pornography, and the progress story to present how difficult it is to clearly delineate the passions’ influence over us and to assess their merit in making us who we are. Written in a deliberately objective and dispassionate language of scientific observation, Life’s Progress demonstrates through its absence of emotional tropes just how necessary it is to evoke sympathy rather than rely on intellectual knowledge for a real comprehension of others’ lives. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.