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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 ...

"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

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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