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.

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 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.

In a wide-ranging study of sentimentalism’s significance for styles, practices and meanings of music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of interpretations scrutinizes musical expressions of sympathetic responses to suffering and the longing to belong. The book challenges hierarchies of artistic value and the associated denigration of sentimental feeling in gendered discourses. Fresh insights are thereby developed into sentimentalism’s place in musical constructions of emotion, taste, genre, gender, desire, and authenticity. The contexts encompass diverse musical communities, performing spaces, and listening practices, including the nineteenth-century salon and concert hall, the cinema, the intimate stage persona of the singer-songwriter, and the homely ambiguities of ‘easy’ listening. Interdisciplinary insights inform discussions of musical form, affect, appropriation, nationalisms, psychologies, eco-sentimentalism, humanitarianism, consumerism, and subject positions, with a particular emphasis on masculine sentimentalities. Music is drawn from violin repertory associated with Joseph Joachim, the piano music of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt, sentimental waltzes from Schubert to Ravel, concert music by Bartók, Szymanowski and Górecki, the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of The Remains of the Day, Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova, and songs by Duke Ellington, Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Barry Manilow and Jimmy Webb. The book will attract readers interested in both the role of music in the history of emotion and the persistence and diversity of sentimental arts after their flowering in the eighteenth-century age of sensibility.

Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling defends feeling against customary distrust or condescension by showing that the affective turn of the eighteenth-century cult of sentiment, despite its sometimes surreal manifestations, has led to a positive culture of feeling. The very reaction against sentimentalism has taught us to identity sentimentality. Fiction, moreover, remains a principal means not just of discriminating quality of feeling but of appreciating its essentially imaginative nature.

This classic novel, written in the midst of the Great Depression, translates the themes of Balzac to a Southern Appalachian setting. Lumpkin traces the path of the McClure family as they move from living as poor bootleggers in the mountains to living in a mill town, earning a pittance as factory workers. The McClures are navigating the treacherous path of industrialization without a safety net, even as the entire country reels with the effects of the Depression. Lumpkin weaves a story in poetic mountains speech, moving through powerful religious experiences, through lawless love, and reaching a tremendous climax in a mill strike waged with all the desperation of a life and death struggle. Without literary tricks or devices she achieves tremendous emotional effects through sincerity and realism.

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