...answerable to certain formal criteria and to certain psychological and philosophical concerns, but as a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and...both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time. The power of a sentimental novel to move its audience depends upon the audience's being in possession...

...these efforts Vncle Tom's Caliin is the most dazzling exemplar.' 2 In reading Uncle Tom's Cabin "as a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and...both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time," she introduces a combinatori' regeneration of the novel form that makes it a model for the kind...

...fiction, which Jane Tompkins describes as a move toward a greater scope and democratization that is profoundly a "political enterprise, halfway between...both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time" (123, 12.6; cf. Douglas). Lauren Berlent suggests that nineteenth-century sentimental activists...

...answerable to certain formal criteria and to certain psychological and philosophical concerns, but as a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and...both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time' ( 1 26) . The contrast that Tompkins draws between authors like Stowe and 'male authors such...

...social criticism in the northeastern United States prior to the Victorian period by a sentimentalist!) that was a passive and hypocritical "rationalization...enterprise, halfway between sermon and social theory," an enterprise that "both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time."3 For Tompkins, this...

...biblical interpretation, and preaching, Stowe began what was to be a long career in the sentimental novel, "a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and...both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time" by its effect on the reader's heart (Tompkins, Sensational Designs, i26). In Uncle Tom's Cabin,...

...most women writers of the period produced sentimental literature, a body of work that Tompkins sees as "a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and...both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time,"14 MARB, while adhering to the precepts of the romance genre, did take on major political issues...

...content to these texts, one that was always already subversive. For Tompkins, the sentimental novel is "a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and...both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time" (126). And I would add, since Tompkins doesn't, "for the better." For isn't this phrase implicit...

...that the "sentimental novel" should be seen less as answerable to certain formal criteria and more as a "political enterprise, halfway between sermon and social theory that both codifies and attempts to mould the values of its time".46 In Stowe's enterprise, dying becomes the supreme form of heroism;...

...answerable to certain formal criteria and to certain psychological and philosophic concerns, but as a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and...both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time. (126, my emphasis) While I am wholly sympathetic to Tompkins's project and to that of other corrective...