The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-century AmericaShirley Samuels Oxford University Press, 1992 - 349 pages In this important new collection, leading scholars in nineteenth-century American culture re-examine the vexed subject of sentimentality. These essays draw upon a range of interdisciplinary approaches to situate sentimentality in terms of "women's culture" and issues of race, before and after the Civil War. Moving beyond the canonical debates about sentimentality, the collection makes visible the particular racial and gendered forms that define the aesthetics and politics of the American culture of sentiment. The contributors use evidence from American cultural history, American studies, and literary criticism, to examine the process by which nineteenth-century American culture was both produced and contested. They present incisive readings of scenes like an antebellum murder trial, the erotic attention audiences paid to the statues of Hiram Powers, and the engravings of Godey's Ladies Book. In addition, they use the writings of Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. DuBois, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to question the political fables immanent in this literature. More generally, they portray nineteenth-century American sentimentality as a national project - a project about imagining the nation's bodies and the national body. With essays by 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, The Culture of Sentiment significantly reorients the field of nineteenth-century American literature, art, culture, and history. It will be of keen interest to those concernedwith women's studies, American studies, cultural studies, African-American studies, and American history and literature. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
Literary Eavesdropping Domestic Fiction and Educational Reform | 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