Love's whipping boy : violence & sentimentality in the American imagination / Elizabeth Barnes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barnes, Elizabeth, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Violence in literature.

Empathy in literature.

Sentimentalism in literature.

National characteristics, American, in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (222 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill [N.C.] : University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Working to reconcile the Christian dictum to ""love one's neighbor as oneself"" with evidence of U.S. sociopolitical aggression, including slavery, corporal punishment of children, and Indian removal, Elizabeth Barnes focuses her attention on aggressors--rather than the weak or abused--to suggest ways of understanding paradoxical relationships between empathy, violence, and religion that took hold so strongly in nineteenth-century American culture.Looking at works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, among others, Barnes shows how violence

Contents:

Introduction

Wieland, familicide, and the suffering father

Melville's fraternal melancholies

Fathers of violence: Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and the radical reproduction of sensibility

The death of boyhood and the making of Little women.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

979-88-908853-7-1

979-88-9313-429-2

1-4696-0334-9

0-8078-7796-4

OCLC:

703227281