This book contends that when late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writers sought to explain the origins of emotions, they often discovered that their feelings may not really have been their own.

It explores the paradoxes of representing feelings in philosophy, aesthetic theory, gender ideology, literature, and popular sentimentality, and it argues that this period's obsession with sentimental, wayward emotion was inseparable from the dilemmas resulting from attempts to locate the origins of feelings in experience.

Making its argument through a provocative conjunction of texts that range across genres and genders and across the divide between the eighteenth century and romanticism, Strange Fits of Passion rediscovers the relationship of empiricism to the culture of sentimentality, and the significance of emotion to romanticism.