Ye Xu

The PhD work on neurosis led me to discover the collective interest of French writers in the question of psychophysiological sensitivity as well as considerable tensions between different thingkings on this subject during the last three decades of the 19th century. Building on this work, my current research explores the concept of sensation, its literary representations, and the poetics of sensory experience. Literary criticism of this time converged to indicate a literary tendency to underline, enrich, intensify and even idealize sensory experience, which they presented as a characteristic novelty in literature. Certain defining features of an emerging sensationist style and their aesthetic effects were frequently identified and discussed. At the same time, this discourse was accompanied by a doxa proclaiming that the sensory irritation is an inevitable pathological result of modern civilisation. These discourses seem to imply that senses are awakening in this age, that they are portrayed in literature in a way that has never been done before. From that, it is difficult not to notice an emergence, even an ascendance of sensation in French literary works and criticism of the second half of the 19th century. What epistemological conditions, axiological frameworks, philosophical reflections, and aesthetic concerns gave rise both to sensationism as a literary tendency and to the critical and theoretical discourses that sought to define, analyse, and evaluate it ?