Read complete books and articles on: Sentimental Literature

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13 of the Best Books and Articles on: Sentimental Literature

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style » Read Now
by Jerome McGann. 222 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Jerome McGann's exciting new work represents the most significant intervention in Romantic studies since his The Romantic Ideology. It takes as its prime aim the reading of neglected poetry, principally by women, which qualifies as either poetry of sensibility or poetry of sentiment. It is certain...
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Jerome McGann's exciting new work represents the most significant intervention in Romantic studies since his The Romantic Ideology. It takes as its prime aim the reading of neglected poetry, principally by women, which qualifies as either poetry of sensibility or poetry of sentiment. It is certain to provoke discussion among anyone interested in the hundred years of poetry it considers. Writers discussed include: Ann Batten Cristall, Benardin, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Gray, Francis Greville, Felicia Hemans, William Jones, Keats, Ossian, Mary Robinson, Schiller, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Ann Yearsley. This newest work by the preeminent critic of Romantic poetry will attract students and scholars of English literature and Women's Studies.
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2.

The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature » Read Now
by Marianne Noble. 258 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

"A well-written and sophisticated study of nineteenth-century female masochism and its expression in the writing of middle-class American women of the period. Marianne Noble's plan is impressive: she is at once a thoughtful theorist and an admirable close reader of texts. The result is a work that...
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"A well-written and sophisticated study of nineteenth-century female masochism and its expression in the writing of middle-class American women of the period. Marianne Noble's plan is impressive: she is at once a thoughtful theorist and an admirable close reader of texts. The result is a work that engages in an illuminating and thought-provoking manner with extremely complex issues."--Suzanne Juhasz, University of Colorado
"Marianne Noble's book is the first study of sentimentality in American women's writing to go decisively beyond the impasse created by the Douglas-Tomkins debate. It brings acute and sophisticated perception to the study of a group of writers whose fate has frequently been to serve as stalking horses for other issues, rather than as objects of individual study in themselves. As a psychoanalytically oriented text, it is remarkably clear and persuasive, using theory to illuminate the dynamics of masochistic fantasy without obscurantism. This is a wonderful book."--Paula Bennett, Southern Illinois University
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3.

The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 » Read Now
by Herbert Ross Brown. 412 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...respect to Victorian literature divide it as one...history of the sentimental novel in America...convincingly told sentimental tale of the century...in American Literature...
4.

Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America » Read Now
by Mary Louise Kete. 284 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

During the 1992 Democratic Convention and again while delivering Harvard University's commencement address two years later, Vice President Al Gore shared with his audience a story that showed the effect of sentiment in his life. In telling how an accident involving his son had provided him with a...
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During the 1992 Democratic Convention and again while delivering Harvard University's commencement address two years later, Vice President Al Gore shared with his audience a story that showed the effect of sentiment in his life. In telling how an accident involving his son had provided him with a revelation concerning the compassion of others, Gore effectively reconstructed himself as a typical, middle-class American for whom sympathy can lead to salvation. This contemporary reiteration of mid-nineteenth-century American sentimental discourse proves to be a fruitful point of departure for Mary Louise Kete's argument that sentimentality has been an important and recurring form of cultural narrative that has helped to shape middle-class American life.
Many scholars have written about the sentimental novel as a primarily female genre and have stressed its negative ideological aspects. Kete finds that in fact many men -- from writers to politicians -- participated in nineteenth-century sentimental culture. Importantly, she also recovers the utopian dimension of the phenomenon, arguing that literary sentimentality, specifically in the form of poetry, is the written trace of a broad cultural discourse that Kete calls "sentimental collaboration" -- an exchange of sympathy that establishes common cultural or intellectual ground. Kete reads the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney with an eye toward the deployment of sentimentality for the creation ot Americanism, as well as for political and abolitionist ends. Finally, she locates the origins of sentimental collaboration in the activities of ordinary people whoparticipated in mourning rituals -- writing poetry, condolence letters, or epitaphs -- to ease their, personal grief.
Sentimental Collaborations significantly advances prevailing scholarship on Romanticism, antebellum cul
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5.

Sensibility in English Prose Fiction, 1760-1814: A Reinterpretation » Read Now
by Walter Wright Francis. 162 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Sterne. 1 That Sterne was sentimental is well known, but the full...masterpieces but in no way by the literature of his time nor by the spirit...to discover in a work of...
6.

English Sentimental Drama » Read Now
by Arthur Sherbo. 184 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Letters of Literature 1785 states that "Sentimental Comedy bore...dramatic literature has been...student of sentimentalism. The period...sympathy for the sentimental...
7.

Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature » Read Now
by Lori Merish. 390 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In Sentimental Materialism Lori Merish considers the intricate relationship between consumption and womanhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as her starting point a diversity of cultural art facts -- from domestic fiction and philosophical treatises to advice literature and...
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In Sentimental Materialism Lori Merish considers the intricate relationship between consumption and womanhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as her starting point a diversity of cultural art facts -- from domestic fiction and philosophical treatises to advice literature and cigars -- Merish explores the symbolic functions they served and finds that consumption evolved into a form of personal expressiveness that indicated not only a woman's wealth and taste but also her race, class, morality, and civic values. The discursive production of this new subjectivity -- the feminine consumer -- was remarkably influential, helping to shape American capitalism, culture, and nation building.
The phenomenon of female consumption was capitalism's complement to male production: It created what Merish calls the "Other Protestant Ethic", a feminine and sentimental counter-part to Max Weber's ethic of hard work, economic rationality, and self-control. In addition, driven by the culture's effort to,civilize the "cannibalistic" practices of ethnic, class, and national otherness, appropriate female consumerism, marked by taste and refinement, identified certain women and their families as proper citizens of the United States. The public nature of consumption, however, had curiously conflicting effects: While the achievement of cultured material circumstances facilitated women's civic agency, it also reinforced stereotypes of domestic womanhood.
Merish's inquiry into middle-class consumption and accompanying ideals of womanhood will appeal to readers in a variety of disciplines, including American studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and cultural history.
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8.

Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature » Read Now
by Glenn Hendler. 275 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

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...
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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.
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9.

The Columbia History of the British Novel ("Sentimental Novels of the Later Eighteenth Century" begins on p. 181) » Read Now
by John J. Richetti. 1066 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

What do Pamela, Shamela, and Evelina have in common? Who is Coningsby? Where is The Moonstone? When does one need A Room of One's Own? Why is it that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? And just how good is the British novel? These are just a few of the questions answered in The Columbia History of the...
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What do Pamela, Shamela, and Evelina have in common? Who is Coningsby? Where is The Moonstone? When does one need A Room of One's Own? Why is it that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? And just how good is the British novel? These are just a few of the questions answered in The Columbia History of the British Novel. John Richetti's comprehensive history takes us from the birth of the novel in the eighteenth century through its social and culture-conscious growing pains in the nineteenth century to its angst-ridden maturity in the twentieth century. Concise, cohesive, and complementary to any collection of must-read classics, The Columbia History of the British Novel challenges and enlightens us by examining canonical writers as well as women and postcolonial novelists. Discover the origins of the novel in the "scandalous" books of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley and follow its development through Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne against the backdrop of the novel's meteoric rise in the 1700s. Follow Frances Burney and the rise of the woman novelist, and the gothic novel as invented by Horace Walpole and perfected by Mary Shelley and Matthew Lewis. Remember remarkable reunions in Jane Austen; the bond between chivalry, Waverley, and Sir Walter Scott; the Brontes, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and the tradition of Romantic women's fiction; Charles Dickens and the professionalization of literature; George Eliot and the novel of ideas; and Wilkie Collins and the sensation mania of the 1860s. Continue through the nineteenth century with the "Condition of England" novels of Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell, Hardy's tales of class and sexualdifference, and Anglo-Indian perspectives on the empire from Rudyard Kipling and Philip Meadows Taylor. Enter the twentieth century and examine the modern novel with Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Then trace the anti-
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10.

Race Passing and American Individualism (Chap. 1 "Passing and the Sentiment Novel") » Read Now
by Kathleen Pfeiffer. 168 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

A literary study of the ambiguities of racial identity in American culture
11.

Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (Chap. 2 "Making a Thing into a Man: The Sentimental Novel and Slavery") » Read Now
by Philip Fisher. 191 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

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...
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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.
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12.

Desire and Death in the Spanish Sentimental Romance, 1440-1550 » Read Now
by Patricia E. Grieve. 150 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...listed the sentimental romances, either...histories of literature or in books...the larger sentimental one. The final...interplay of literature and life in...of chivalric...
13.

Backgrounds of English Literature, 1700-1760 (Chap. III "Whig Panegyric Verse: A Phase of Sentimentalism") » Read Now
by Cecil A. Moore. 258 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...of French sentimentalism, he would...of English literature. His importance...condemn as sentimentalism in literature is the logical...posturing sentimentalist is...