“Pathetic and impressive”: recovering the role of American sentimental novels in the fiction/morality conflict (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric by Faye Halpern
ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2014
Studies of the relationship between US literary culture, political theory, and the public sphere are booming. Landmark works by Pricilla Wald, Russ Castronovo, Dana Nelson, Lauren Berlant, Wai Chee Dimock and others have opened a rich field of inquiry into the impact of literary culture on political culture and vice versa, a field that attacks on the humanities and the continued instrumentalization of American culture make more relevant than ever. Three recent works by Michal Jan Rozbicki, Victoria Olwell, and Edward Cahill intervene into this loosely defined field in an effort to articulate the impact of popular, elite, and literary cultures on the American Revolution, women's civic inclusion, and early national literature, respectively. These books, and perhaps Olwell's in particular, also extend scholarly conceptions of early American and nineteenth-century publics and counterpublics in significant ways. In Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, historian Rozbicki attacks, head-on, the "radicalism" of the American Revolution depicted by Gordon Wood and others. Arguing that previous accounts of the cultural and intellectual origins of the revolution are marred by the ahistorical application of modern conceptions of liberty to the conflict, Rozbicki seeks to recover the eighteenth-century Anglo-American sense of liberty, and to describe how it changed over the course of the revolution.
Sentimentality in Life & Literature
In his paper "In Defense of Sentimentality" in the book of the same name, Robert Solomon aims to rehabilitate the concept of sentimentality both in life and in literature, and to defend it against its many critics. He argues that the root sense of "sentimentality" is simply "an expression of and appeal to the tender emotions" and that the most common criticisms of sentimentality as a kind of emotional affectation, falsity, or self-indulgence fail. In this paper I argue that the critics are right to say that sentimentality in real life can be ethically problematic, but that Solomon is right to say that sentimental responses to sentimental literature are (usually) ethically harmless. It's true that sentimental literature is not usually "great literature." Its goal is usually pleasure rather than increasing our moral understanding, and partly for this reason it may not be as aesthetically valuable as the great realist novels of George Eliot, Henry James and company. On the other hand, Solomon is quite right to argue that sentimental novels serve an important ethical function in promoting what literary scholar Robyn Warhol calls the "effeminate" virtues of tenderness and compassion.
Tracing back the meaning of sentimentality through time, this paper aims to illustrate the cultural and social importance of the Sentimental Novel (1790-1860) as well as its particular impact on society despite the much deployed claim of lacking “intellectuality.” It analyzes established feminist work by sentimental novelists and feminist concepts found between the lines of sentimental texts such as Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson, The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster and Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Part One explores the concept of (pure) rationalism since the ancient Greek and how its philosophy has impacted literary and social discourse until today. Part Two examines early feminist work that can be found in sentimental texts. Part Three sheds light on female body politics discussed in sentimental work. Part Four discusses the question of empathy.
The Henry James Review, 2012
This essay outlines an unorthodox literary genealogy. By examining the vestiges of the sentimental plot in Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton it demonstrates that domestic fiction, written primarily by a cluster of American women authors in the nineteenth century, played a formative role in the advent of literary modernism. While the novel displays James's evolving focus on perception, it simultaneously reflects on sentimental ideology as a cultural and literary phenomenon, satirizing the domestic genre even while memorializing it. In James's generic conversions, the domestic interiors devoutly composed by sentimental authors emerge as models for the ornate psychic interiorities fashioned by modernist investigations of consciousness.