The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century AmericaShirley Samuels Oxford University Press, 1992 M12 17 - 360 pages Samuels's collection of critical essays gives body and scope to the subject of nineteenth-century sentimentality by situating it in terms of "women's culture" and issues of race. Presenting an interdisciplinary range of approaches that consider sentimental culture before and after the Civil War, these critical studies of American literature and culture fundamentally reorient the field. Moving beyond alignment with either pro- or anti-sentimentality camps, the collection makes visible the particular racial and gendered forms that define the aesthetics and politics of the culture of sentiment. Drawing on the fields of American cultural history, American studies, and literary criticism, the contributors include Lauren Berlant, Ann Fabian, Susan Gillman, Karen Halttunen, Carolyn L. Karcher, Joy Kasson, Amy Schrager Lang, Isabelle Lehuu, Harryette Mullen, Dana Nelson, Lora Romero, Shirley Samuels, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Lynn Wardley, and Laura Wexler. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 9 | |
Competing Narratives of Womanhood in the Murder Trial of Lucretia Chapman | 39 |
Lydia Maria Childs Antislavery Fiction and the Limits of Genre | 58 |
Reading Godeys Ladys Book in Antebellum America | 73 |
The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition | 92 |
Gender Empire and New Historicism | 115 |
7 Class and the Strategies of Sympathy | 128 |
The Greek Slave | 172 |
11 Sympathy as Strategy in Sedgwicks Hope Leslie | 191 |
The Aesthetics of Sentiment in the Work of Stowe | 203 |
13 The Mulatto Tragic or Triumphant? The NineteenthCentury American Race Melodrama | 221 |
Resistant Orality in Uncle Toms Cabin Our Nig Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Beloved | 244 |
Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment | 265 |
Notes | 283 |
Contributors | 341 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
abolition abolitionist African American antebellum antislavery fiction appears argues audience beauty black women body Bois bourgeois century critical culture death discourse Douglas engraving essay fashion plates father female feminine feminist Feminization Fern Fern's figure gamblers gambling gender genre girls Godey's Godey's Lady's Book Greek Slave Green Grimké Harriet Beecher Stowe Hope Leslie husband identity ideology images imagined Indian Iron Mills ladies Liberty Bell literary literature Lucretia Chapman Lydia Maria Child Magawisca magazine male marriage Mary maternal middle-class miscegenation moral mother mulatto murder narrative narrator Negro nineteenth Nineteenth-Century America novel patriarchal political popular problem published race melodrama racial readers reading reform relations representation sculpture Sedgwick sentimental fiction sexual slavery social society spiritual story Stowe's suggests texts tion Tompkins Uncle Tom's Cabin victims Victorian W. E. B. Du Bois William woman womanhood women writers writing York
Popular passages
Page 11 - In reaction against their world view, and perhaps even more against their success, twentiethcentury critics have taught generations of students to equate popularity with debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness, religiosity with fakery, domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority.
Page 11 - ... a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and social theory, that both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time.