articles+ search results

American poetry--19th century--History and criticism, American poetry--Women authors--History and criticism, Persuasion (Rhetoric), Social problems in literature, and Sentimentalism in literature

At a time when a woman speaking before a mixed-gender audience risked acquiring the label “promiscuous,” thousands of women presented their views about social or moral issues through sentimental poetry, a blend of affect with intellect that allowed their participation in public debate. Bridging literary and rhetorical histories, traditional and semiotic interpretations, Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment explores an often overlooked, yet significant and persuasive pre–Civil War American discourse. Considering the logos, ethos, and pathos—aims, writing personae, and audience appeal—of poems by African American abolitionist Frances Watkins Harper, working-class prophet Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and feminist socialite Julia Ward Howe, Wendy Dasler Johnson demonstrates that sentimental poetry was an inportant component of antebellum social activism. She articulates the ethos of the poems of Harper, who presents herself as a properly domestic black woman, nevertheless stepping boldly into Northern pulpits to insist slavery be abolished; the poetry of Sigourney, whose speaker is a feisty, working-class, ambiguously gendered prophet; and the works of Howe, who juggles her fame as the reformist “Battle Hymn” lyricist and motherhood of five children with an erotic Continental sentimentalism. Antebellum American Women's Poetry makes a strong case for restoration of a compelling system of persuasion through poetry usually dismissed from studies of rhetoric. This remarkable book will change the way we think about women's rhetoric in the nineteenth century, inviting readers to hear and respond to urgent, muffled appeals for justice in our own day.

Slavery in literature, Sentimentalism in literature, Suffering--America--History--18th century--Sources, Slavery--America--History--18th century--Sources, Sentimentalism--America--History--18th century--Sources, Suffering in literature, Slaves' writings, American--History and criticism, American literature--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775--History and criticism, and English literature--18th century--History and criticism

Spectacular Suffering focuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves.The book's first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders. Spectacular Suffering then turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves'petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals. In examining the slaves'embodied agency, the book moves away from spectacular images of suffering to concentrate on slow, incremental acts of regeneration by the enslaved. One of the foremost contributions of this study is its exploration of the ways in which the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion—African slaves—negotiated the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery.Throughout, Mallipeddi's keen reading of primary texts alongside historical and critical work produce fresh and persuasive insights. Spectacular Suffering is an important book that will alter conceptions of slave agency and of sentimentalism across the long eighteenth century.

English fiction--Women authors--History and criticism, English fiction--18th century--History and criticism, Sentimentalism in literature, and Women and literature--England--History--18th century

During the later eighteenth century, changes in the meaning and status of literature left popular sentimental novels stranded on the margins of literary history. While critics no longer dismiss or ignore these works, recent reassessments have emphasized their interventions in various political and cultural debates rather than their literary significance. Sentimental Memorials, by contrast, argues that sentimental novels gave the women who wrote them a means of clarifying, protesting, and finally memorializing the historical conditions under which they wrote. As women writers successfully navigated the professional marketplace but struggled to position their works among more lasting literary monuments, their novels reflect on what the elevation of literature would mean for women's literary reputations. Drawing together the history of the novel, women's literary history, and book history, Melissa Sodeman revisits the critical frameworks through which we have understood the history of literature. Novels by Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson, she argues, offer ways of rethinking some of the signal literary developments of this period, from emerging notions of genius and originality to the rise of an English canon. And in Sodeman's analysis, novels long seen as insufficiently literary acquire formal and self-historicizing importance.

Sentimentalism in literature and American literature--20th century--History and criticism

Today's critical establishment assumes that sentimentalism is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode that all but disappeared by the twentieth century. In this book, Jennifer Williamson argues that sentimentalism is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, she explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals.Williamson covers new ground by examining authors who are not generally read for their sentimental narrative practices, considering the proletarian novels of Grace Lumpkin, Josephine Johnson, and John Steinbeck alongside neo-slave narratives written by Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison. Through careful close readings, Williamson argues that the appropriation of sentimental modes enables both sympathetic thought and systemic action in the proletarian and neo-slave novels under discussion. She contrasts appropriations that facilitate such cultural work with those that do not, including Kathryn Stockett's novel and film The Help. The book outlines how sentimentalism remains a viable and important means of promoting social justice while simultaneously recognizing and exploring how sentimentality can further white privilege.Sentimentalism is not only alive in the twentieth century. It is a flourishing rhetorical practice among a range of twentieth-century authors who use sentimental tactics in order to appeal to their readers about a range of social justice issues. This book demonstrates that at stake in their appeals is who is inside and outside of the American family and nation.

Sentimentalism in literature

In this fascinating study, Chris Messenger posits F. Scott Fitzgerald as a great master of sentiment in modern American fiction. Sentimental forms both attracted and repelled Fitzgerald while defining his deepest impulses as a prose writer. Messenger demonstrates that the sentimental identities, refractions, and influences Fitzgerald explores in Tender Is the Night define key components in his affective life, which evolved into a powerful aesthetic that informed his vocation as a modernist writer. In “Tender Is the Night” and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities, Messenger traces the roots of Fitzgerald's writing career to the deaths of his two infant sisters a few months before his own birth. It was their loss, Fitzgerald wrote, that made him a writer. Messenger highlights how the loss of Fitzgerald's siblings powerfully molded his relation to maternal nurturing and sympathy in Tender Is the Night as well as how it shaped the homosocial intimations of its care-giving protagonist, psychiatrist Dick Diver. A concomitant grief and mourning was fueled by Fitzgerald's intimate and intense creative rivalry with his often-institutionalized wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. While sentiment is a discredited strain in high modernism, Fitzgerald nevertheless embraced it in Tender Is the Night to fashion this most poignant and beautiful successor to The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald's aesthetic and emotional preoccupations came most vividly to life in this major novel. Messenger describes how Fitzgerald, creating his character Nicole Warren Diver as a victim of paternal incest, finally found the sentimental key to finishing his novel and uniting his vision of the two narratives of “saving” the two sisters and reimagining the agony of his wife and their marriage. Fitzgerald's productive quarrel with and through sentiment defines his career, and Messenger convincingly argues that Tender Is the Night should be placed alongside TheGreat Gatsby as a classic exemplar of the modern novel.

Sentimentalism--United States--History--19th century, American literature--19th century--History and criticism, and Sentimentalism in literature

Sentimentalism emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as a moral philosophy founded on the belief that individuals are able to form relationships and communities because they can, by an effort of the imagination, understand one another's feelings. American authors of both sexes who accepted these views cultivated readers'sympathy with others in order to promote self-improvement, motivate action to relieve suffering, reinforce social unity, and build national identity. Entwined with domesticity and imperialism and finding expression in literature and in public and private rituals, sentimentalism became America's dominant ideology by the early nineteenth century. Sentimental writings and practices had political uses, some reformist and some repressive. They played major roles in the formation of bourgeois consciousness. The first new collection of scholarly essays on American sentimentalism since 1999, this volume brings together ten recent studies, eight published here for the first time. The Introduction assesses the current state of sentimentalism studies; the Afterword reflects on sentimentalism as a liberal discourse central to contemporary political thought as well as literary studies. Other contributors, exploring topics characteristic of the field today, examine nineteenth-century authors'treatments of education, grief, social inequalities, intimate relationships, and community. This volume has several distinctive features. It illustrates sentimentalism's appropriation of an array of literary forms (advice literature, personal narrative, and essays on education and urban poverty as well as poetry and the novel) objects (memorial volumes), and cultural practices (communal singing, benevolence). It includes four essays on poetry, less frequently studied than fiction. It identifies internal contradictions that eventually fractured sentimentalism's viability as a belief system—yet suggests that the protean sentimental mode accommodated itself to revisionary and ironized literary uses, thus persisting long after twentieth-century critics pronounced it a casualty of the Civil War. This collection also offers fresh perspectives on three esteemed authors not usually classified as sentimentalists—Sarah Piatt, Walt Whitman, and Henry James—thus demonstrating that sentimental topics and techniques informed “realism” and “modernism” as they emerged Offering close readings of nineteenth-century American texts and practices, this book demonstrates both the limits of sentimentalism and its wide and lasting influence.

Narration (Rhetoric) and Sentimentalism in literature

How could novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin change the hearts and minds of thousands of mid-nineteenth-century readers, yet make so many modern readers cringe at their over-the-top, tear-filled scenes? Sentimental Readers explains why sentimental rhetoric was so compelling to readers of that earlier era, why its popularity waned in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and why today it is generally characterized as overly emotional and artificial. But author Faye Halpern also does more: she demonstrates that this now despised rhetoric remains relevant to contemporary writing teachers and literary scholars. Halpern examines these novels with a fresh eye by positioning sentimentality as a rhetorical strategy on the part of these novels'(mostly) female authors, who used it to answer a question that plagued the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century American rhetoric and oratory: how could listeners be sure an eloquent speaker wasn't unscrupulously persuading them of an untruth? The authors of sentimental novels managed to solve this problem even as the professional male rhetoricians and orators could not, because sentimental rhetoric, filled with tears and other physical cues of earnestness, ensured that an audience could trust the heroes and heroines of these novels. However, as a wider range of authors began wielding sentimental rhetoric later in the nineteenth century, readers found themselves less and less convinced by this strategy. In her final discussion, Halpern steps beyond a purely historical analysis to interrogate contemporary rhetoric and reading practices among literature professors and their students, particularly first-year students new to the “close reading” method advocated and taught in most college English classrooms. Doing so allows her to investigate how sentimental novels are understood today by both groups and how these contemporary reading strategies compare to those of Americans more than a century ago. Clearly, sentimental novels still have something to teach us about how and why we read.

Children's stories, Canadian--History and criticism, Orphans in literature, Children's stories, American--History and criticism, Girls in literature, Child rearing in literature, Canadian fiction--19th century--History and criticism, Canadian fiction--20th century--History and criticism, American fiction--20th century--History and criticism, Sentimentalism in literature, and American fiction--19th century--History and criticism

At the heart of some of the most beloved children's novels is a passionate discussion about discipline, love, and the changing role of girls in the twentieth century. Joe Sutliff Sanders traces this debate as it began in the sentimental tales of the mid-nineteenth century and continued in the classic orphan girl novels of Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. M. Montgomery, and other writers still popular today. Domestic novels published between 1850 and 1880 argued that a discipline that emphasized love was the most effective and moral form. These were the first best sellers in American fiction, and by reimagining discipline as a technique of the heart—rather than of the whip—they ensured their protagonists a secure, if limited, claim on power. This same ideal was adapted by women authors in the early twentieth century, who transformed the sentimental motifs of domestic novels into the orphan girl story made popular in such novels as Anne of Green Gables and Pollyanna. Through close readings of nine of the most influential orphan girl novels, Sanders provides a seamless historical narrative of American children's literature and gender from 1850 until 1923. He follows his insightful literary analysis with chapters on sympathy and motherhood, two themes central to both American and children's literature, and concludes with a discussion of contemporary ideas about discipline, abuse, and gender. Disciplining Girls writes an important chapter in the history of American, women's, and children's literature, enriching previous work about the history of discipline in America.

Sentimentalism in literature, National characteristics, American, in literature, American fiction--19th century--History and criticism, Violence in literature, and Empathy in literature

Working to reconcile the Christian dictum to'love one's neighbor as oneself'with evidence of U.S. sociopolitical aggression, including slavery, corporal punishment of children, and Indian removal, Elizabeth Barnes focuses her attention on aggressors--rather than the weak or abused--to suggest ways of understanding paradoxical relationships between empathy, violence, and religion that took hold so strongly in nineteenth-century American culture.Looking at works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, among others, Barnes shows how violence and sensibility work together to produce a more'sensitive'citizenry. Aggression becomes a site of redemptive possibility because salvation is gained when the powerful protagonist identifies with the person he harms. Barnes argues that this identification and emotional transformation come at a high price, however, as the reparative ends are bought with another's blood. Critics of nineteenth-century literature have tended to think about sentimentality and violence as opposing strategies in the work of nation-building and in the formation of U.S. national identity. Yet to understand how violence gets folded into sentimentality's egalitarian goals is to recognize, importantly, the deep entrenchment of aggression in the empathetic structures of liberal, Christian culture in the United States.

National characteristics, British, in literature, Sentimentalism in literature, British--Foreign countries, Expatriation in literature, Material culture in literature, English fiction--19th century--History and criticism, Personal belongings in literature, and Property in literature

What fueled the Victorian passion for hair-jewelry and memorial rings? When would an everyday object metamorphose from commodity to precious relic? In Portable Property, John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national identity intact. In an empire defined as much by the circulation of capital as by force of arms, the challenge of preserving Englishness while living overseas became a central Victorian preoccupation, creating a pressing need for objects that could readily travel abroad as personifications of Britishness. At the same time a radically new relationship between cash value and sentimental associations arose in certain resonant mementoes--in teacups, rings, sprigs of heather, and handkerchiefs, but most of all in books. 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.

Sentimentalism in literature and Social values in literature

Criticism of Woolf is often polarised into viewing her work as either fundamentally progressive or reactionary. In this 2007 book, Steve Ellis argues that her commitment to anxiety about modernity coexists with a nostalgia and respect for aspects of Victorian culture threatened by radical social change. Ellis tracks Woolf's response to the Victorian era through her fiction and other writings, arguing that Woolf can be seen as more'Post-Victorian'than'modernist'. He explains how Woolf's emphasis on continuity and reconciliation related to twentieth-century debates about Victorian values, and he analyses her response to the First World War as the major threat to that continuity. This detailed and original investigation of the range of Woolf's writing attends to questions of cultural and political history and fictional structure, imagery and diction. It proposes a fresh reading of Woolf's thinking about the relationships between the past, present and future.

Imperialism in literature, Colonies in literature, Sentimentalism in literature, English fiction--18th century--History and criticism, and French fiction--18th century--History and criticism

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.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism, Emotions in literature, Didactic fiction, American--History and criticism, Sentimentalism in literature, Sympathy in literature, and Sex role in literature

In this book, Glenn Hendler explores what he calls the'logic of sympathy'in novels by Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, T. S. Arthur, Martin Delany, Horatio Alger, Fanny Fern, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells. For these nineteenth-century writers, he argues, sympathetic identification was not strictly an individual, feminizing, and private feeling but the quintessentially public sentiment--a transformative emotion with the power to shape social institutions and political movements.Uniting current scholarship on gender in nineteenth-century American culture with historical and theoretical debates on the definition of the public sphere in the period, Hendler shows how novels taught diverse readers to'feel right,'to experience their identities as male or female, black or white, middle or working class, through a sentimental, emotionally based structure of feeling. He links novels with such wide-ranging cultural and political discourses as the temperance movement, feminism, and black nationalism. Public Sentiments demonstrates that, whether published for commercial reasons or for higher moral and aesthetic purposes, the nineteenth-century American novel was conceived of as a public instrument designed to play in a sentimental key.

Women and literature--United States--History--20th century, Sentimentalism in literature, and Realism in literature

American literature--1783-1850--History and criticism, Gender identity in literature, Politics and literature--United States--History--19th century, Politics and literature--United States--History--18th century, Citizenship in literature, Sex role in literature, Sentimentalism in literature, and Human body in literature

Sentimentalism, sex, the construction of the modern body, and the origins of American liberalism all come under scrutiny in this rich discussion of political life in the early republic. Here Bruce Burgett enters into debates over the'public sphere,'a concept introduced by Jurgen Habermas that has led theorists to grapple with such polarities as public and private, polity and personality, citizenship and subjection. With the literary public sphere as his primary focus, Burgett sets out to challenge the Enlightenment opposition of reason and sentiment as the fundamental grid for understanding American political culture. Drawing on texts ranging from George Washington's'Farewell Address'and Charles Brockden Brown's Clara Howard to Hannah Foster's The Coquette and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Burgett shows that the sentimental literary culture of the period relied on readers'affective, passionate, and embodied responses to fictive characters and situations in order to produce political effects. As such, sentimentalism located readers'bodies both as prepolitical sources of personal authenticity and as public sites of political contestation. Going beyond an account of the public sphere as a realm to which only some have full access, Burgett reveals that the formation of the body and sexual subjectivity is crucial to the very construction of that sphere. By exploring and destabilizing the longstanding distinction between public and private life, this book raises questions central to any democratic political culture.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism, Slavery in literature, Feminism and literature--United States--History--19th century, Women and literature--United States--History--19th century, American literature--Women authors--History and criticism, Popular culture--United States--History--19th century, African Americans in literature, Sentimentalism in literature, Sex role in literature, and Race in literature

Samuels's collection of critical essays gives body and scope to the subject of nineteenth-century sentimentality by situating it in terms of'women's culture'and issues of race. Presenting an interdisciplinary range of approaches that consider sentimental culture before and after the Civil War, these critical studies of American literature and culture fundamentally reorient the field. Moving beyond alignment with either pro- or anti-sentimentality camps, the collection makes visible the particular racial and gendered forms that define the aesthetics and politics of the culture of sentiment. Drawing on the fields of American cultural history, American studies, and literary criticism, the contributors include Lauren Berlant, Ann Fabian, Susan Gillman, Karen Halttunen, Carolyn L. Karcher, Joy Kasson, Amy Schrager Lang, Isabelle Lehuu, Harryette Mullen, Dana Nelson, Lora Romero, Shirley Samuels, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Lynn Wardley, and Laura Wexler.

American fiction--19th century--History and criticism, Popular literature--United States--History and criticism, Setting (Literature), Historical fiction, American, Sentimentalism in literature, Slavery in literature, and Cities and towns in literature

American culture has often been described in terms of paradigmatic images--the wilderness, the Jeffersonian landscape of family farms, the great industrial cities at the turn of the 19th century. But underlying these cultural ideals are less happy paradoxes. Settling the land meant banishing the Indians and destroying the wilderness; Jeffersonian landscapes were created with the help of the new country's enslaved citizens; and economic opportunities in the cities were purchased at the high price of self-commercialization. In this study of the popular 19th- and early 20th-century American novel, Philip Fisher demonstrates how such works as Dreiser's Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Cooper's The Deerslayer worked to make these three'hard facts'of the 19th-century American experience familiar and tolerable--or familiar and intolerable--to their wide audience of readers. His perceptive analysis proves that the most important cultural'work'was accomplished not by novels generally taken to be at the core of the American literary canon--those of Hawthorne, Melville, or Twain--but rather by books which never abandoned the ambition to be widely read.

Sentimentalism in literature, Masculinity in literature, American literature--Male authors--History and criticism, Men--United States--Psychology, Sex role in literature, Emotions in literature, and Men in literature

The essays in this volume analyze a wide variety of cultural forms to demonstrate the centrality of masculine sentiment in American literary and cultural history from the early republic to the progressive era. Challenging the association of sentimentality exclusively with femininity in studies of American culture, the contributors analyze sentimentalism not just as a literary genre but as a structure of feeling manifested in many areas: temperance testimonials, begging letters, historiography, philanthropic performance, photography, portraiture, and poetry. Essays from a variety of disciplines—American studies, literature, history, art, gender studies—deconstruct the alignment of reason, commerce, and the public sphere with men, and feelings, domesticity, and the private sphere with women.

Sentimentalism in literature, Women in literature, Spanish fiction--Roman influences, Spanish fiction--To 1500--History and criticism, Epistolary fiction, Spanish--History and criticism, and Separation (Psychology) in literature

In this wide-ranging study Marina Scordilis Brownlee investigates the importance of the letter--often a complex interplay of objectivity and subjectivity--in the establishment of novelistic discourse. She shows how Ovid's Heroides explore the discourse of epistolarity in a way that exerted a lasting effect on Italian, French, and Spanish works of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, especially on the fifteenth-century Spanish novela sentimental, or'sentimental romance.'Presenting this proto-novelistic form as a highly original rewriting of Ovid, Brownlee demonstrates that its language model interrogates rather than affirms the linguistic referentiality implied by romance. Whereas the ambiguity of the sign had been articulated in fourteenth-century Spain (most notably by the Libro de buen amor), it is the fifteenth-century novela sentimental that fully grasps the existentially, novelistically dire consequences of this ambiguity. And in the process of deconstructing the referentiality that underlies romance, the novela sentimental reveals itself to be a discursively essential step in the evolution of the modern novel.Originally published in 1990.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Authors, American--19th century--Biography, Celebrities--United States--Biography, Authorship--History--19th century, and Sentimentalism in literature

How did the stately, republican literary world of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper give way to the sensationalist, personality-saturated mass market society of the late nineteenth century? In answering this question, Sentiment and Celebrity tells the story of a man the New York Times once called'the most talked-about author in America.'A widely admired, if controversial, master of the sentimental appeal, poet and'magazinist'Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867) was a pioneer in the modern business of celebrity. In his heyday, he knew both popularity and success as few other American writers had. Willis, who became the gossip-dishing darling of the middle class and whose sister was the popular writer Fanny Fern (of Ruth Hall fame), was a shrewdly self-styled man of letters who attained international fame by publicizing the renowned figures of the day, including himself, and by playing to, or playing upon, the sentimental desires of his readers. By the 1840s, he could count himself among the nation's highest paid writers and most influential arbiters of fashion and feeling (especially with genteel women), though he could also describe himself, accurately enough, as one of the'best abused'literary men of his generation. With fame and self-promotion came unexpected, perhaps unforeseeable, burdens, and scandal followed eventually. By charting the various controversies that surrounded Willis, this book shows how the cultural and commercial impulses that fostered antebellum America's new love of fame and fashion drew sustenance from the concurrent allure of genteel cultivation and sentiment. Still, perennial tensions between desires for privacy and the invasive impulses of publicity, and between desires for sincerity and the appeal of social and commercial artifice, rendered this cultural conjunction highly unstable. Readers of Willis were both attracted to and disturbed by his written work and his very person; he introduced new possibilities for fashion, taste, and celebrity, and these new modes of thought and emotion were at once enchanting and unsettling. Because this cultural instability and the impulses that spawned it cut across a number of discourses, and because, in many ways, this double-edged quality remains central to our modern celebrity culture, Sentiment and Celebrity will appeal to students and scholars of several disciplines, among them literary studies, women's studies, sociocultural history, and communication studies. As Thomas N. Baker demonstrates in these fascinating pages, not only does Willis's story enrich our understanding of the early history of celebrity and the development of this country's literary marketplace in the years before the Civil War, it also shows how the cultural phenomena of sentiment and celebrity have gone hand in hand since their inception. Given the countless ways in which fame (literary or otherwise) continues to pervade (and pervert) the American Dream, Baker's book is a'life and times'study that speaks directly to our own lives.