eBook

The plight of feeling

Julia A. Stern

1997

Overview

American novels written in the wake of the Revolution overflow with self-conscious theatricality and impassioned excess. In The Plight of Feeling, Julia A. Stern shows that these sentimental, melodramatic, and gothic works can be read as an emotional history of the early republic, reflecting the hate, anger, fear, and grief that tormented the Federalist era. Stern argues that these novels gave voice to a collective mourning over the violence of the Revolution and the foreclosure of liberty for the nation's noncitizens—women, the poor, Native and African Americans. Properly placed in the context of late eighteenth-century thought, the republican novel emerges as essentially political, offering its audience gothic and feminized counternarratives to read against the dominant male-authored accounts of national legitimation. Drawing upon insights from cultural history and gender studies as well as psychoanalytic, narrative, and genre theory, Stern convincingly exposes the foundation of the republic as an unquiet crypt housing those invisible Americans who contributed to its construction.

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Subject: 1759-1840 / 1762-1824 / 1771-1810 / 18th century / American fiction / American fiction -- 18th century -- History and criticism / Brown, Charles Brockden / Brown, Charles Brockden, 1771-1810. Ormond / Charlotte Temple / Coquette / Dissenters in literature / Emotions in literature / Foster, Hannah Webster / Foster, Hannah Webster, 1759-1840. Coquette / History / History and criticism / Mrs / Ormond / Politics and literature / Politics and literature -- United States -- History -- 18th century / Psychological fiction, American / Psychological fiction, American -- History and criticism / Rowson / Rowson, Mrs., 1762-1824. Charlotte Temple / Sympathy in literature / United States
• ISBN: 9780226773117, 0226773094, 0226773108, 9780226773100, 9780226773094, 0226773116