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"Sentimentalism in literature"
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The Afterlife of Sympathy
Literary realism rose to prominence in postbellum America with
what the realists heralded as artful and accurate depictions of the
world. Realism is thought to have replaced sentimentality-an
earlier mode of writing the realists disparaged, which has often
been seen as antithetical to realism. Literary scholar Faye Halpern
challenges this apparent binary by uncovering how and why William
Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson,
and Charles Chesnutt incorporated sentimental elements into their
most famous works. With its distinctively narratological approach,
The Afterlife of Sympathy offers a more rhetorical way to
understand sentimentality and assess the ethical complexity of
sympathy. Halpern demonstrates how sentimentality enables authors
to form intimate relationships between their characters and readers
to supplement the critical distance that realist writers otherwise
celebrate and that has remained a key value in literary studies
today. In reassessing American literary realism, Halpern seeks not
only to understand why these writers adopted sentimental techniques
but to provide insight into contemporary arguments in literary
studies about critical distance and sympathetic identification.
eBook
The Sentimental Touch
Between 1850 and 1940, with the rise of managerial capitalism in the United States, the most powerful businesses ceased to be family owned, instead becoming sprawling organizations controlled by complex bureaucracies. Sentimental literature--work written specifically to convey and inspire deep feeling--does not seem to fit with a swiftly bureaucratizing society. Surprisingly, though, sentimental language persisted in American literature, even as a culture of managed systems threatened to obscure the power of individual affect. The Sentimental Touch explores the strange, enduring power of sentimental language in the face of a rapidly changing culture. Analyzing novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and Nathanael West, the book demonstrates that sentimental language changes but remains powerful, even in works by authors who self-consciously write against the sentimental tradition. Sentimental language has an afterlife, enduring in American literature long after authors and critics declared it dead, insisting that human feeling can resist a mechanizing culture and embodying, paradoxically, the way that literary conventions themselves become mechanical and systematic.
eBook
Portable property : Victorian culture on the move
\"Portable Property examines how culture bearing objects came to stand for distant people and places, creating or preserving a sense of self and community despite geographic dislocation. Victorian novels - because they themselves came to be understood as the quintessential portable property - tell the story of this change most clearly. Plotz analyzes a wide range of works, paying particular attention to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Anthony Trollope's Eustace Diamonds, and R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone. He also discusses Thomas Hardy and William Morris's vehement attack on the very notion of cultural portability. The result is a richer understanding of the role of objects in British culture at home and abroad during the Age of Empire.\"--BOOK JACKET.
Book
Sharing stories: Sentimentality and sociable reading as articulating concern for animals
The literary work may be ideally placed to explore animal sentience and to capture human moments of appreciation of animal sentience. Reading occurs in a space of interiority in the first instance. That is, reading is an almost immediate experience of inter-subjectivity with literary characters and representation, arguably less mediated than the use of voiceover in film or visual art representation. Shared reading such as that which occurs in book clubs shifts from a space of individual exploration and interiority to a more communal space of exploration. This paper examines the intersections between literary animal studies and research into themed book clubs through revisiting data from a small regional project conducted on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia, Ethics Approval HREC: A/ 13/439. We do so to investigate the impact of group reading on values and beliefs about nonhuman animals. This paper considers book clubs' power to facilitate and articulate pro-animal sentiment, thus contributing to more recent research establishing the cultural and psychological mechanisms behind the power of fiction to make us care for animals (Malecki et al. 2019) as well as that on book clubs as method. Here we reflect on how sociable reading of works that centralise the lives of animals, facilitates the articulation of past inter-species connections and shifts subsequent engagements with other species.
Journal Article
The Story within the Story of Sentimental Fiction
Why are scenes of storytelling so central to sentimental fiction in late eighteenth-century Britain? Shifts in narrative level, where a character tells their story—most often of tragic loss—to another character, are as familiar to readers of sentimental fiction as the tears its heroes and heroines shed. This essay analyzes the typical structure of embedding in a range of sentimental novels, including Man of Feeling, David Simple, History of Emily Montague, and Millenium Hall, in order to show how narrative exchanges most often involve the exchange of money and moral feeling. The \"narrative of a narrative\" that embedded stories tell concerns the historical tensions between virtue and commerce at a nascent moment in the history of capitalism and scenes of storytelling work to manage capitalism's foundational contradiction between use value and exchange value. The essay ultimately demonstrates how stories-within-stories in sentimental novels are, themselves, embedded within capitalism's system of exchange.
Journal Article
Sentimental figures of empire in eighteenth-century Britain and France
In this ambitious and original study, Lynn Festa examines how and why sentimental fiction became one of the primary ways of representing British and French relations with colonial populations in the eighteenth century. Drawing from novels, poetry, travel narratives, commerce manuals, and philosophical writings, Festa shows how sentimentality shaped communal and personal assertions of identity in an age of empire.
Read in isolation, sentimental texts can be made to tell a simple story about the emergence of the modern psychological self. Placed in conversation with empire, however, sentimentality invites both psychological and cultural readings of the encounter between self and other. Sentimental texts, Festa claims, enabled readers to create powerful imagined relations to distant people. Yet these emotional bonds simultaneously threatened the boundaries between self and other, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized. Festa argues that sentimental tropes and figures allowed readers to feel for others, while maintaining the particularity of the individual self. Sentimental identification thus operated as a form of differentiation as well as consolidation.
Festa contends that global reach increasingly outstripped imaginative grasp during this era. Sentimentality became an important tool for writers on empire, allowing conquest to be portrayed as commerce and scenes of violence and exploitation to be converted into displays of benevolence and pity. Above all, sentimental texts used emotion as an important form of social and cultural distinction, as the attribution of sentience and feeling helped to define who would be recognized as human.
eBook