Over the course of the long eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and Mary Shelley transformed the art of the novel in order to promote new forms of sympathetic identification. Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to ridicule the presumptive politics of sentimentality-whether through depictions of over-indulgent introspection, disconnected observation, or physical and sensory incapacity. My project, Subjects of Feeling, addresses these issues only to assign the eighteenth-century sentimental novel an unarticulated political purpose. I argue that the supposed artificiality of sentimental narratives-precisely the qualities that lead to charges of their being too theatrical, bathetic, digressive, out of proportion, and unnatural-is not a sign of their failure to be politically transformative, nor a symptom of ideological critique. Against the critical assumption that social connection requires literary practices associated with realism (correspondence, resemblance, and mimesis), my readings demonstrate that it is precisely the refusal to fully naturalize or authenticate objects of representation that allows sentimental narratives to reconfigure who can be seen as a "natural" subject of feeling-and thus as a subject of politics. The formal configurations of eighteenth-century sentimental literature, I argue, embody the "silent" passage from a representative regime of art concerned with roles and genres to the Romantic expressive regime where anybody can become a subject.