“She Fell Senseless on His Corpse”: The Woman of Feeling and the Sentimental Swoon in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

This essay explores the female sentimental swoon in eighteenth-century novels, including Sarah Fielding's _The History of Ophelia_ (1760), Jean-Jacques Rousseau's _Julie, or the New Heloise_ (1761), and Elizabeth Inchbald's _A Simple Story_ (1791). It argues that losses of sense and consciousness express the discontents of eighteenth-century female psycho-sexual existence. The essay approaches the psychopathology of sensibility by means of a theoretical framework that connects eighteenth-century medical explanations with psychoanalytic ideas of negativity.