LA OBRA DE HENRY MACKENZIE Y LAS SECUENCIAS TÍPICAS DE LA NARRATIVA SENTIMENTAL

Abstract

The Scottish Enlightenment writer Henry Mackenzie is the author of three novels, the first of which, The Man of Feeling, achieves a notable success in the cultural trend of British sentimentalism. We are interested in certain narrative and thematic motives which are central to this age and this culture: the benevolence of the man of feeling, the fraud to which he is often a victim, the tragical seduction of a heroine by a libertine villain and the variant of the same plot, protagonized by the same type characters but with a happy ending. Such plots and types are central in Mackenzie and only through them is built the microcosmos of his novels and his most famous short stories. Consequently, Mackenzie’s work has been seen as quintessentially sentimental. In his themes and plots is comprehended a certain notion of virtue (we will use for it the concept of “idelogeme”) which characterizes the
narrative of this age and this cultural trend.