Introduction, Mary De Jong
Part One: Rethinking Sentimental Motherhood
“These Human Flowers”: Sentimentalizing Children and Fashioning
Maternal Authority in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Kara Clevinger“The
Medicine of Sympathy”: Maternal Affective Pedagogy in Antebellum
America,” Ken ParilleThe Ethics of Postbellum Melancholy in the
Poetry of Sarah Piatt, D. Zachary FinchPart Two: The Politics of
Sentimentality
“The Language of the Eye”: Communication and Sentimental
Benevolence in Lydia Sigourney’s Poems and Essays about the Deaf,
Elizabeth PetrinoLydia Maria Child’s Use of Sentimentalism in
Letters from New-York, Susan Toth LordSympathetic Jo: Tomboyism,
Poverty, and Race in Alcott’s Little Women, Kristen Proehl
Part Three: Loss, Death, Mourning and Grief
Desired and Imagined Loss as Sympathetic Identification: Bachelor
Melancholia in Donald Grant Mitchell’s Reveries of a Bachelor,
Maglina LubovichThe Collaborative Construction of a Death-Defying
Cryptext: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Adam Bradford“Such Verses
for My Body Let Us Write”: Civil War Song, Sentimentalism, and
Whitman’s Drum-Taps, Robert ArbourPsychological Sentimentalism:
Consciousness, Affect, and the Sentimental Henry James, George
Gordon-Smith
Afterword, Mary Louise Kete
Works Cited
Contributors
Mary G. De Jong is associate professor of English and Women's Studies at Penn State Altoona.
De Jong, coeditor (with Earl Yarington) of Popular
Nineteeth-Century Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace
(2007), has brought together ten essays on sentimentalism in
American literature and culture. The contributions--most by rising
scholars--are grouped into three sections: "Rethinking Sentimental
Motherhood," "Reform and Sympathetic Identification," and "Loss,
Death, Mourning, and Grief." The diversity of the essays supports
De Jong's main assertions: contemporary criticism views
sentimentalism as a protean term applicable to literary and
nonliterary forms; sentimentalism characterizes works representing
liberal, progressive, and reactionary stances; and the concept is
associated not solely with femininity. Several essays focus on men:
novelist Donald Grant Mitchell and poets Walt Whitman and Henry
James, who all dealt with sentimentality. Mary Louise Kete, author
of Sentimental Collaborations, contributes an illuminating
afterword (which could well have substituted for De Jong's less
cogent introduction) contextualizing the essays and offering an
overview of current scholarship. Especially significant is Kete's
discussion of sympathy ("the definitive affect of sentiment") and
its relationship to the liberal self. This collection offers
thoughtful readings of the texts considered, although the essays as
a whole do not advance any particular overarching argument. Summing
Up: Recommended. For collections serving graduate students and
researchers.
*Choice Reviews*
These essays make important claims for connections between
sentimentalism and realism and modernism. As a whole, the
collection reaffirms the centrality of the mode to
nineteenth-century American literature, and suggests that the
limits of sentimentalism stretch further than is usually
acknowledged.
*Year's Work in English Studies*
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