Sensibility in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term "sensibility" denoted "quickness and acuteness of apprehension or feeling; sensitiveness" and the "capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; and readiness to feel compassion for suffering, and to be moved by the pathetic in literature or art" (OED). Although sensibility is not historically synonymous with "sentimentality," excessive sensibility can and often does degenerate into sentimentality. In American literature such exaggerated sensibility is a pervasive ingredient in the sentimental novel