Rule of sympathy : sentiment, race, and power, 1750-1850 / Amit S. Rai.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rai, Amit, 1968-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sympathy--History--18th century.

Sympathy.

Race relations--History--18th century.

Race relations.

Social values--Europe--History--18th century.

Social values.

Sympathy--History--19th century.

Race relations--History--19th century.

Social values--Europe--History--19th century.

History.

Europe.

Physical Description:

xxi, 225 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave, 2002.

Summary:

"Rule of Sympathy" is a social and historical critique of sympathy in British discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Although initially associated with feminized or effeminate forms of sentimental discourse (the romance, the novel, the gothic), sympathy came to function as a key technology of gender and race in new evangelical social movements, such as abolitionism and missionization. Amit Rai argues that sympathy was a paradoxical mode of power. The differences of racial, gender, and class inequalities that increasingly divided the object and agent of sympathy were precisely what must be bridged through identification. Yet without such differences, which were differences of power, sympathy itself would be impossible. This paradoxical mode of power transformed the ways in which people came to think of how best to manage, order, and govern individuals and populations in the late eighteenth century.

Contents:

Preface: Through the Archives of Sympathy xi

Chapter 1 Sympathetic Governmentality: The Traces of Religion and the Family 1

Chapter 2 The Rules of Sympathy 15

Chapter 3 "Some Inscrutable Appeal": Race, Gender, and the Closure of Sentimentalism 61

Chapter 4 Theaters of Horror 117

Conclusion: In the Name of Sympathy 161.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [215]-220) and index.

ISBN:

0312293933

OCLC:

48494154