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Bouso, Tamara and Segundo, Pablo Ruano San
Nordic Journal of English Studies . 2021, Vol. 20 Issue 1, p215-257. 43p.
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Literary style, Sentimental fiction, Sentimentalism in literature, English fiction, and Direct discourse in literature
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This article provides a description of the British Sentimental Novel Corpus (BSNC) and a case study that explores, at the level of the individual, the relation between the Reaction Object Construction (ROC) and the Direct Discourse Construction (DDC). The BSNC is a large-scale specialised corpus that comprises full novels of eleven canonical authors across three generations from 19th century British fiction. It aims at studying language as both a social and a cognitive phenomenon and, in line with a recent trend in historical sociolinguistics, at exploring the interaction between individual and aggregate levels (see Fonteyn 2017; Hilpert 2020; Petré et al. 2019). The first part describes the methodological principles that underlie the design and compilation of the BSNC. In the second part, we present a new case study that aims to determine whether our previous aggregate findings also hold at the individual level. The results serve to confirm our hypothesis: first, individual changes in the ROC and the DDC run in parallel across almost the entire 19th century, correlating most significantly between 1851 and 1860. Second, the aggregate-level division of labour between these two functionally similar constructions turned out to be a feature of all authors in the BSNC. Last, the ROC-DDC alternation has been attested in an important proportion of the BSNC novels, with only a relatively small group of texts using solely the older and less extravagant variant (i.e. the DDC). This suggests that the alternation as such represents a cognitive reality for these individual writers across their lifespan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Sillin, Sarah
African American Review . Fall2019, Vol. 52 Issue 3, p277-292. 16p.
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SENTIMENTALISM in literature, AFRICAN American literature -- History & criticism, and 19TH century American literature
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The article explores sentimentalism in literature, offering a deep dive into the writings of African American women writers in the nineteenth-century. Works discussed include "Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black," by Harriet Wilson, "Clotel, or, The President's Daughter," by William Wells and "The Garies and Their Friends," by Frank J. Webb. The books plots, protagonists, themes and what the author describes as resistant humor and sentimental legacies are also discussed.
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Halpern, Ira
- American Literature; Dec2021, Vol. 93 Issue 4, p629-654, 26p
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MODERN literature, AMERICAN literature, MEDICAL care in literature, REALISM, and SENTIMENTALISM in literature
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The literary and cultural dimensions of the longstanding US political debate over public versus private health care have been critically underexplored. How did early twentieth-century US writers portray the business of medical care within a stratified US economy? In Robert Herrick's The Healer (1911), Wallace Thurman and A. L. Furman's The Interne (1932), and Frank G. Slaughter's That None Should Die (1941), the problems of inequality, profit, and corruption plague the practice of professional medicine. The writers of these novels do not, for the most part, blame the trouble with care on individual nurses, doctors, or other medical staff. Instead of exposing the power of individual medical practitioners to exploit bodies, these novels call attention to the power of capitalism and inequality to distort and derange the mission of medicine. Yet, the political critiques offered by health care fictions are foreclosed by anxieties about collective reform and government intervention in health care. So, this article asks why some of the most sustained literary treatments of capitalist medicine in US literature ultimately retreat from the structural critiques that they themselves raise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Slote, Michael
International Journal of Philosophical Studies . Jul2018, Vol. 26 Issue 3, p419-436. 18p.
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SELF-sacrifice, SENTIMENTALISM in literature, ALTRUISM, PRUDENCE, and EMPATHY
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For obvious reasons sentimentalists have been hesitant to offer accounts of moral reasons for action: the whole idea at least initially smacks of rationalist notions of morality. But the sentimentalist can seek to reduce practical to sentimentalist considerations and that is what the present paper attempts to do. Prudential reasons can be identified with the normal emotional/motivational responses people feel in situations that threaten them or offer them opportunities to attain what they need. And in the most basic cases altruistic/moral reasons involve the empathic transfer of one person’s prudential reasons and emotions to another person or persons who can help them. Practical/moral reasons for self-sacrifice also depend on empathic transfer and can vary in strength with the strength of the transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Katherine Binhammer and Katherine Binhammer
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Capitalism in literature, English literature--18th century--History and criticism, Sentimentalism in literature, and Social mobility in literature
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How do the stories we tell about money shape our economies?Beginning in the late eighteenth century, as constant growth became the economic norm throughout Europe, fictional stories involving money were overwhelmingly about loss. Novel after novel tells the tale of bankruptcy and financial failure, of people losing everything and ending up in debtor's prison, of inheritances lost and daughters left orphaned and poor. In Downward Mobility, Katherine Binhammer argues that these stories of ruin are not simple tales about the losers of capitalism but narratives that help manage speculation of capital's inevitable collapse.Bringing together contemporary critical finance studies with eighteenth-century literary history, Binhammer demonstrates the centrality of the myth of downward mobility to the cultural history of capitalism—and to the emergence of the novel in Britain. Deftly weaving economic history and formal analysis, Binhammer reveals how capitalism requires the novel's complex techniques to render infinite economic growth imaginable. She also explains why the novel's signature formal developments owe their narrative dynamics to the contradictions within capital's form. Combining new archival research on the history of debt with original readings of sentimental novels, including Frances Burney's Cecilia and Camilla, Sarah Fielding's David Simple, and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Downward Mobility registers the value of literary narrative in interpreting the complex sequences behind financial capitalism, especially the belief in infinite growth that has led to current environmental crises. An audacious epilogue arms humanists with the argument that, in order to save the planet from unsustainable growth, we need to read more novels.
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Fahs, Alice
Civil War History . Jun2000, Vol. 46 Issue 2, p107. 25p.
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Sol Miguel-Prendes and Sol Miguel-Prendes
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Spanish literature--To 1500--History and criticism and Sentimentalism in literature
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Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain proposes a new taxonomy and conceptual frame for the controversial Iberian genre of sentimental fiction. It traces its origin to late-medieval education in rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine as the foundation for virtuous living. In establishing the genre's boundaries and cultural underpinnings, Narrating Desire emphasizes the crucial link between Eastern and Western Iberian sentimental traditions, and offers close readings of a vast array of Catalan and Castilian fictions, translations, narrative poems, letters, and doctrinal treatises: the Catalan translations of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, Santillana's El sueno, Bernat Metge's Lo somni, Romeu Llull's Lo despropiament d'amor, Pedro Moner's La noche and L'anima d'Oliver, Rodriguez del Padron's Siervo libre de amor, Carros Pardo de la Casta's Regoneixenca, Rois de Corella's Parlament and Tragedia de Caldesa, Pedro de Portugal's Satira, Francesc Alegre's Somni and Raonament, Pere Torroella's correspondence, and the well-known works by Diego de San Pedro (Arnalte y Lucenda; Carcel de Amor) and Juan de Flores (Grisel y Mirabella; Grimalte y Gradissa) among others. From them, Miguel-Prendes singles out a group of dream visions whose interpretive and compositional practices sire the sentimental genre. Social interactions lead to either a consolatory or a sentimental form, which imply very different ways of seeing: the allegorical gaze of consolation gives way to narrative fiction. In distorting moral conversion, the sentimental genre heralds the novel.
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9. On Sympathetic Grounds : Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America [2017]
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Naomi Greyser and Naomi Greyser
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Sympathy in literature, American literature--19th century--History and criticism, Sentimentalism in literature, Social problems in literature, and Geography and literature--United States
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With its filigreed, formidable representations of tears and suffering, sentimentalism has remained a divisive genre and category of analysis. On Sympathetic Grounds offers a new interpretation of the sentimental by mapping its grounds in North America. During sweeping transformations of territory, land stewardship, personhood, and citizenship in the nineteenth century, sentimentalists evoked sympathy to express a desire for a place that was both territorial and emotional--what Naomi Greyser calls an'affective geography.'Greyser traces the intricacies attending Americans'sentimental sense that bodies could merge and mutually occupy the same space at the same time. Affective geographies complicate normative, linear assumptions about intimacy and distance, and consequently compel a reconsideration of geopolitics, geophysics and the distribution of resources and care. Mapping feelings in and also about space, On Sympathetic Grounds focuses on the experiences and perspectives of those whose bodies, labor and sovereignty have been occupied to ground others'lives and world-making projects. Bringing literary and rhetorical studies together with critical race and gender theory, cultural geography, American studies, affect studies and the new materialism, this book lays out sentimentalism's usefulness to settler colonialism and the maintenance of racialized labor. The book also carefully charts sentimentalism's value as a means of resisting geographic displacement and both physical and metaphysical dispossession. Philosophers and rhetoricians regard grounds as necessary conditions for argumentation; Greyser treats grounds as also geopolitical, geoaffective, and geophysical. Sympathy has enriched conditions for living at the same time that it has mercilessly enlisted some bodies and lives as the grounds for others'wellbeing. Ultimately, On Sympathetic Grounds uncovers a moving, non-linear cartography of sympathy's vital place in shaping North America.
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10. From the Maternal to the Mechanical. [2017]
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MILITELLO, JENNIFER
American Poetry Review . May/Jun2017, Vol. 46 Issue 3, p35-38. 4p.
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21ST century American poetry, SENTIMENTALISM in literature, MOTHERHOOD, LITERARY realism, LITERATURE & culture, and POETRY (Literary form)
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The article discusses the element of sentimentalism in contemporary American poetry on motherhood. It states how the realism concept is used in American poetical literature to depict motherhood as a happy event and eliminate the sentimentality. It also discusses how motherhood poetry should abide by the norms of literary and cultural aesthetics. It mentions poets like Sophie Jewett, Anne Bradstreet and Rachel Zucker.
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Wendy Dasler Johnson and Wendy Dasler Johnson
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American poetry--19th century--History and criticism, American poetry--Women authors--History and criticism, Persuasion (Rhetoric), Social problems in literature, and Sentimentalism in literature
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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.
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Ramesh Mallipeddi and Ramesh Mallipeddi
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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
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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.
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Melissa Sodeman and Melissa Sodeman
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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
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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.
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Williamson, Jennifer A. and Williamson, Jennifer A.
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Sentimentalism in literature and American literature--20th century--History and criticism
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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.
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Christian K. Messenger and Christian K. Messenger
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Sentimentalism in literature
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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.
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Parlin, Maxwell
- Dostoevsky Journal: An Independent Review; 2021, Vol. 22 Issue 1, p124-149, 26p
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HUMANISM in literature, SENTIMENTALISM in literature, and NARRATOLOGY
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Exploring the connection between Dostoevsky's Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, Bitov's Lev Nikolaevich Odoevtsev, and Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, this article interprets The Idiot through the prism of Pushkin House. The overarching claim is that Bitov's novel and hero provide deep insight into Dostoevsky's. Specifically, Pushkin House illuminates a dynamic left cryptic in The Idiot: how sentimental scripting (narratology) interrelates with humanism (theology), and how sentimental humanism, despite the good intentions of its practitioners, is counterproductive. In brief, sensitivity, a positive trait, unchecked by the sobering notion of sin, easily tips into sentimentality, prone to idolize the other. Idolatry of other, paradoxically, turns out to be idolatry of self. Apparently innocuous and sympathetic, sentimental scripting nevertheless contains the seeds of tragedy and tyranny, as Bitov's novel makes explicit, linking this dynamic ultimately with Stalinism. The antidote to endless fear and manipulation of others, Pushkin House suggests, is a personal relationship with God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Pugh, Tison
- Lion & the Unicorn; Jan2021, Vol. 45 Issue 1, p1-17, 17p
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ETHICS in literature and SENTIMENTALISM in literature
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Mary G. De Jong and Mary G. De Jong
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Sentimentalism--United States--History--19th century, American literature--19th century--History and criticism, and Sentimentalism in literature
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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.
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Faye Halpern and Faye Halpern
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Narration (Rhetoric) and Sentimentalism in literature
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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.
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Allan, Jonathan A.
- Journal of Popular Culture; Oct2020, Vol. 53 Issue 5, p1160-1178, 19p
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BEREAVEMENT in literature, GRIEF in literature, HEROES in literature, SENTIMENTALISM in literature, and WIDOWERS
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The article focuses on the book "Lost in Sensation," by Maureen Child. The author explores the themes of joy and mourning within the book, examines the idea of heroes and sentimental heroism within romance novels, and discusses the book's representation of love after loss, specifically for the widower.
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Elizabeth Barnes and Elizabeth Barnes
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Sentimentalism in literature, National characteristics, American, in literature, American fiction--19th century--History and criticism, Violence in literature, and Empathy in literature
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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.
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Joe Sutliff Sanders and Joe Sutliff Sanders
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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
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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.
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O'Connell, Lisa
- Eighteenth-Century Life. Apr2017, Vol. 41 Issue 2, p28-42. 15p.
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WINDELL, MARIA A.
American Literary Realism . Spring2017, Vol. 49 Issue 3, p246-262. 17p.
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Schöberlein, Stefan
College Literature . Summer2018, Vol. 45 Issue 3, p449-486. 38p.
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SENTIMENTALISM in literature, POETRY (Literary form), and EQUALITY
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The article examines the sentimental affect in poet Walt Whitman's works as a poetic and political strategy which moves beyond traditional misreadings of this literary mode as being uncreative. According to the author, sentimentalism was a major part of Whitman's egalitarian vision of society. His book "Leaves of Grass" is also discussed.
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Schreiber, Jan
- Literary Imagination; Mar2020, Vol. 22 Issue 1, p1-12, 12p
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POETRY (Literary form), FAMILY relations, ENGLISH poetry, SENTIMENTALISM in literature, and PARENT-child relationships
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The article focuses on features of contemporary poetry is its frequent focus on familial relations between parents and young children and between middle-aged children and their aging parents. It mentions explorations of the nature of affection between parents and children rarely found their way into English-language poetry. It also mentions sentimentality such as pornography and poem "Morning Song" by Sylvia Plath and legitimacy of parent-child relations.
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28. In Werther's Thrall: Suicide and the Power of Sentimental Reading in Early National America. [2011]
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Bell, Richard
Early American Literature . Mar2011, Vol. 46 Issue 1, p93-120. 28p. 2 Black and White Photographs, 2 Illustrations.
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FIELD, JESSE
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly . Winter2011, Vol. 34 Issue 1, p83-95. 13p.
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SENTIMENTALISM in literature, MASS media, CHINA in literature, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, INTIMACY (Psychology), and CONFUCIANISM & literature
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The article explores the role of sentiment and intimate relations in Chinese mass media. It references the theories of cultural critics Lauren Berlant and Lee Hai-yan. Particular focus is given to the autobiographical essays of Chinese author Yang Jiang. According to the author, Yang's use of Confucian conventions of belonging in her essays allows readers to access a so-called Chinese intimate public. It is suggested that there is significant tension between social and political criticism and popular sentimental conventions in middlebrow Chinese literature. Topics discussed include Yang Jiang's father, Confucian official Yang Yinhang, the Cultural Revolution, and invisibility
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30. Pop Goes America - II. [1967]
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Michelson, Peter
New Republic . 9/9/67, Vol. 157 Issue 11, p23-28. 5p.
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SENTIMENTALISM in literature, ABSURD (Philosophy) in literature, AESTHETICS, FAREWELL to Arms, A (Book : Hemingway), NAKED the Dead, The (Book : Mailer), AMERICAN literature, HEMINGWAY, Ernest, 1899-1961, and MAILER, Norman, 1923-2007
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Illustrates America's thriving sentimental aesthetic tradition, which the author characterizes as poetics of the absurd. Examination of Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" and Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" to argue artistic evolution from the sentimental to the absurd imagination; Nature's sympathy for man's fate in Hemingway; Absurdity of moral displacement in Mailer.
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Beebee, Thomas O.
Eighteenth Century Fiction . Fall2007, Vol. 20 Issue 1, p61-88. 28p.
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SENTIMENTALISM in literature, LETTER writing, OPEN letters, and SCANDALS
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The article focuses on the issues of privacy and correspondence that are brought to light by the scandal involving eighteenth century author Susannah Minifie Gunning who alleged that her daughter was engaged to the Marquis of Blandford. The author examines Gunning's literary career prior to the scandal and it is noted that Gunning's novels exuded sentimentality. Author Horace Walpole's comments on the scandal, published openly in English newspapers, are examined.
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32. Uncle Tom's (Ship) Cabin. [2020]
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SMITH, CYNTHIA ALICIA
- ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature & Culture; 2020, Vol. 66 Issue 1, p47-88, 43p
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ANTISLAVERY movements in literature, SLAVE trade in literature, RACISM in literature, SENTIMENTALISM in literature, SLAVERY in literature, and ACTIVISM in literature
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POTTER, EDWARD T.
- Lessing Yearbook; 2020, Vol. 47, p99-120, 22p
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SENTIMENTALISM in literature
34. German Quixotism, or Sentimental Reading. [2004]
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Heins, John P.
Eighteenth Century Fiction . Apr2004, Vol. 16 Issue 3, p419-450. 32p.
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SENTIMENTALISM in literature, GERMAN fiction, and EIGHTEENTH century
- Abstract
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Discusses the connection between sentimentalism and quixotism in the 18th-century German novels "Grandison der Zweite, oder Geschichte des Herrn v. N*** in Briefen entworfen" and "Der deutsche Grandison: Auch eine Familiengeschichte," by J.K.A. Musäus. Issues of realistic portrayal in literary texts; Moral efficacy of imaginative literature; National identity in the arts; Engagement of debates about representation; Skepticism about the poetics of moral effect and the claim of verisimilitude in the sentimental novel.
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King, John
English Language Notes . Mar2003, Vol. 40 Issue 3, p26. 13p.
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SENTIMENTALISM in literature and HUMAN sexuality
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Presents a critical analysis of the book 'A Sentimental Journey,' by Laurence Sterne, which depicts sentimentality. Possible explanations for the ambiguous sentimentality of the novel's hero; Interpretation of the theme of sexuality.
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REZNICK, SCOTT M.
- ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature & Culture; 2019, Vol. 65 Issue 4, p602-641, 40p
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ANTISLAVERY literature, PRESBYTERIAN Church -- History, LIBERALISM in literature, and SENTIMENTALISM in literature
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Fichtelberg, Joseph
Early American Literature . Jan1997, Vol. 32 Issue 1, p1. 19p.
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Berlin, Henry and Berlin, Henry
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John Plotz and John Plotz
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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
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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.
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Eccles, Anastasia
New Literary History . Autumn2016, Vol. 47 Issue 4, p525-545. 21p.
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FORMALISM (Literary analysis) and SENTIMENTALISM in literature
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An essay is presented on the tension between the emotionally phobic formalism of literary critic Viktor Shklovsky and the sentimentalism of novelist Laurence Sterne. It focuses on the fit between the theory of Shklovsky and narrative practice of Sterne by placing the recuperation of Sterne by Shklovsky in the context of his sentimental reception in Russia. It discusses the formalist suppression of sentimentalism of Shklovsky by accepting the natural fit between "Tristram Shandy" and formalism.
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Shmidt, Jane
- English Studies; Jun2019, Vol. 100 Issue 4, p422-437, 16p
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SENTIMENTAL fiction, SENTIMENTALISM in literature, IDEOLOGY, SENSITIVITY (Personality trait), and BETRAYAL
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Scholars agree that Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility mocks the cult of sensibility and denounces its excess romanticized by the sentimental novel, yet the stumbling block to this interpretation is that Marianne's claim to sensibility is corroborated when her unfulfilled love manifests in a near-death affliction. The present article examines the role of the heroine's feelings in her ailment and its significance for the novel's depiction of the concurrent socio-medical ideology. Unlike her lovesick antecedents whose genuine heightened responsiveness to distressing events produces unwelcome somatic disorder, Marianne cultivates her sensibility, nourishing her disappointment and humiliation, until bodily illness ensues. That is, Austen's text does not present Marianne merely as a victim of a constitutional predisposition but instead suggests that sensibility could be mitigated or fostered to serve her purposes. The heroine indulges the malady to negotiate her position in the Georgian era society that excludes her from ritualistic disputes associated with betrayal and wounded honour, creating a context for romantic conflict that is otherwise denied her. Marianne's lovesickness functions as a prolonged psychological duel, a suicide fantasy through which she punishes the duplicitous beloved and the society that inculcates the restrictions to the woman's role in romantic relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Buhks, Nora
Modern Language Review . Oct1985, Vol. 80 Issue 4, p884-889. 6p.
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SENTIMENTALISM in literature, RUSSIAN literature, LITERARY form, EMOTIONS, and FICTION
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The article informs that Russian narrative prose first flourished in the age of Sentimentalism. Literary scholarship bears some resemblance to journalism. Members of both professions are attracted towards success and fame, often writing only about phenomena which were widely applauded in their time. Such has been the case with Russian Sentimentalist prose. For the study of Russian Sentimentalist narrative prose it is exceptionally significant both to understand its origins and to perceive the factors which were important in its creation, for it is precisely they that determined its individuality as a genre distinct from European prose of the same period. Many scholars link the appearance of narrative prose in late eighteenth-century Russia with the influence of the West European Sentimentalist novel. But, whilst such a link cannot be denied, in the opinion of the present writer this influence was not so much direct as indirect. It may be worthwhile to review briefly the way modern scholarship has described the role of non-literary forms in the development of European Sentimentalist prose, although the present article is limited to the role of private correspondence as an organizing factor in the form of eighteenth-century narrative genres.
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MEYER-SICKENDIEK, BURKHARD
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (DVjs) . Jun2014, Vol. 88 Issue 2, p206-233. 28p.
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45. The Power of Pathos: James Burn Russell's Life in One Room and the Creation of Council Housing. [2019]
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Smyth, James J.
- Scottish Historical Review; Apr2019, Vol. 98 Issue 1, p103-127, 25p
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PATHOS, HOUSING, VICTORIAN Period, Great Britain, 1837-1901, and SENTIMENTALISM in literature
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James Burn Russell's pamphlet, Life in One Room (1888), is almost certainly the best known and, as is argued here, the most influential published work in the history of social reform in modern Scotland. Regardless of Russell's own intentions and political beliefs Life in One Room became the default source for those who sought to promote housing for the working class and council housing in particular. It is remarkable just how often, and at what length, it was quoted in writings about and referenced in debates on housing before the first world war, during the war and after. This article seeks to identify the influence and attraction of Russell's pamphlet with particular reference to the author's opposition to social Darwinism and to its literary qualities. Russell's style was quintessentially Victorian but this is not to dismiss it as hopelessly sentimental. Informed by recent approaches to the history of Victorian culture and literature we can see how Russell, equally at home in the arts as in the sciences, consciously used sentimentalism or pathos to get his message across to the wider public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Speltz, Andrea
- Monatshefte; Spring2019, Vol. 111 Issue 1, p19-37, 19p
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READING comprehension, ENLIGHTENMENT, and SENTIMENTALISM in literature
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This article situates Wieland's Der Neue Amadis within the history of reading pedagogy in Germany. It begins by arguing that Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy furnishes Wieland with the narrative techniques for advancing critical reading practices. It proceeds with a brief outline of the major developments in eighteenth-century reading pedagogy, which culminate in the use of imaginative literature as a means to develop various mental faculties. Lastly, it formulates the pedagogical goals of Der Neue Amadis and compares them to other reading methodologies of the time. The main argument is that reading Der Neue Amadis with an eye for its pedagogical goals gives us a clearer picture of how imaginative literature could be seen to promote the goal of enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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47. Virginia Woolf and the Victorians [2007]
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Ellis, Steve and Ellis, Steve
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Sentimentalism in literature and Social values in literature
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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.
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Dauber, Kenneth
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Binhammer, Katherine
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Lynn Festa and Lynn Festa
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Imperialism in literature, Colonies in literature, Sentimentalism in literature, English fiction--18th century--History and criticism, and French fiction--18th century--History and criticism
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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.
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