SOURCE: Ebersole, Gary L. “Capturing the Audience: Sentimental Literature and the New Reading Covenant.” In Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity, pp. 98-128. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.

In the excerpt below, Ebersole traces the emergence of the sentimental novel format in eighteenth-century captivity narratives, focusing on Edward Kimber's novel The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson.

Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. … By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in...