This thesis examines the intersection of sentimentalism and self-reflexive narrative practices in eighteenth-century novels featuring men of feeling. Major works in the sentimental canon such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy(1760-67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771) include men of feeling as a means of dramatizing the benefits as well as the anxieties of aligning sympathetic human nature with the body’s sensibility. However, these works also share a tendency to employ self-referential narrative techniques – including typographical play, editorial and authorial intrusion, multiple competing narrative voices, fragmentation, digression, and a proliferation of printerly metaphors – that betray a distinctly eighteenth-century concern for the book as a physical object, and for the parallels between printed books and human bodies. My thesis argues that these narrative methods could be productively approached as strategies of corporeal defamiliarization , which support the moral and aesthetic aims of sentimentalism by engaging with the materiality of texts and drawing attention to the embodied characteristics of both literary and affective experience. This project traces the genealogy of the connection between sentimentalism and an embodied mode of narrative self-reflexivity from dual origins in Augustan satire and the Scottish Enlightenment, to its manifestations in the novels of Sterne, Smollett, and Mackenzie, and to the gradual loss of coherence of this connection in post-Revolution fiction such as Robert Bage’s Hermsprong (1796) and Elizabeth Hamilton’sMemoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). Along the way, individual chapters focus on specific insights into sentimentalism’s relationship to larger debates in the period about language, technology, medicine, and gender. Ultimately, I argue, these insights taken together reveal (a) the subtle and complex means by which sentimentalism adapts neoclassical ideals of virtue to the needs and concerns of an increasingly modem and commercial British society, and (b) that sentimentalism could be regarded as a later manifestation of somaticism, a worldview that rose to prominence around the turn of the eighteenth century. As critics including Richard Kroll and Deidre Lynch have examined, the somatic cultural imagination of eighteenth-century Britain balances a privileging of embodied experience with a sophisticated appreciation for the mediated and unstable foundations of knowledge, identity and value.