Sentimentalism is a practice of being sentimental, and thus tending towards making emotions and feelings the basis of a person´s actions and reactions, as opposed to reason.
As a literary mode, sentimentalism has been a recurring aspect of world literature. Sentimentalism includes a variety of aspects in literature, such as sentimental poetry, the sentimental novel, and the German sentimentalist music movement, Empfindsamkeit. European literary sentimentalism arose during the Age of Enlightenment, partly as a response to sentimentalism in philosophy. In eighteenth-century England, the sentimental novel was a major literary genre. Its philosophical basis primarily came from Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, a pupil of John Locke.
en
