Sentimentalism

Sentimentalism is a literary movement of the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century that, in opposition to the rationalism of Classicism, proclaimed the cult of feeling, the sensitivity of the heart, the natural goodness of the human being, and the value of the simple life of the 'little person'. The Sentimentalists depicted intimate experiences, touching destinies, and the idyll of rural life, and turned their attention to the inner world of ordinary people. The name comes from Laurence Sterne's novel A Sentimental Journey; vivid examples are Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and the prose of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Ukrainian literature the founder of Sentimentalism was Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko: his tale Marusia was the first to show the lofty spiritual beauty and tragic fate of a simple peasant girl, affirming the value of folk character and of the living Ukrainian language in 'serious' prose.