Sentimentalism in nineteenth-century America : literary and cultural practices / edited by Mary G. De Jong, with Paula Bernat Bennett.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

De Jong, Mary G.

Bennett, Paula.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American literature.

Sentimentalism in literature.

Sentimentalism--United States--History--19th century.

Sentimentalism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (244 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Madison : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; Lanham, Md. : Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Pub. Group, Inc., 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Tracing the eighteenth-century origins of sentimentalism, the collection illustrates its proliferation in nineteenth-century America. Sentimental writings by both sexes played a major role in the formation of middle-class culture and identity as sentimentalism interacted with developing ideals of domesticity, reform movements, and nationhood. Contributors explore motherhood, education, reform, loss and mourning, and the Civil War's explosion of the faith in universal feelings and ideas on which sentimentalism was based. ("Both sexes" is an impo

Contents:

Introduction / Mary De Jong

Rethinking Sentimental Motherhood. "These Human Flowers": Sentimentalizing Children and Fashioning Maternal Authority in Godey's Lady's Book / Kara Clevinger

"The Medicine of Sympathy": Maternal Affective Pedagogy in Antebellum America / Ken Parille

The Ethics of Postbellum Melancholy in the Poetry of Sarah Piatt / D. Zachary Finch

The Politics of Sentimentality. "The Language of the Eye": Communication and Sentimental Benevolence in Lydia Sigourney's Poems and Essays about the Deaf / Elizabeth Petrino

Lydia Maria Child's Use of Sentimentalism in Letters from New-York / Susan Toth Lord

Sympathetic Jo: Tomboyism, Poverty, and Race in Alcott's Little Women / Kristen Proehl

Loss, Death, Mourning and Grief. Desired and Imagined Loss as Sympathetic Identification: Bachelor Melancholia in Donald Grant Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor / Maglina Lubovich

The Collaborative Construction of a Death-Defying Cryptext: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass / Adam Bradford

"Such Verses for My Body Let Us Write": Civil War Song, Sentimentalism, and Whitman's Drum-Taps / Robert Arbour

Psychological Sentimentalism: Consciousness, Affect, and the Sentimental Henry James / George Gordon-Smith

Afterword / Mary Louise Kete.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN:

9781611476064

OCLC:

851972053