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.

中文翻译：

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感伤小说中的故事

为什么在 18 世纪后期的英国，讲故事的场景对感伤小说如此重要？叙事层次的转变，一个角色向另一个角色讲述他们的故事——通常是悲剧性的失败——对于感伤小说的读者来说，就像它的英雄和女主角流下的眼泪一样熟悉。这篇文章分析了一系列感伤小说中嵌入的典型结构，包括《有感情的人》、《大卫·简单》、《艾米丽·蒙塔古的历史》和《千年大厅》，以展示叙事交流如何最常涉及金钱和道德感情的交流。嵌入故事讲述的“叙事的叙事”涉及资本主义历史初期美德与商业之间的历史紧张关系，以及叙事工作的场景，以管理资本主义在使用价值和交换价值之间的基本矛盾。这篇文章最终展示了感伤小说中的故事本身是如何嵌入资本主义的交换体系中的。