Sentimental Literature Research Articles

Uncle Tom's (Ship) Cabin

Uncle Tom's (Ship) Cabin Cynthia Alicia Smith (bio) In Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life among the Lowly (1852), there are several curious, largely unexamined moments when Tom figures as a sailor. He assists the steamboat mariners with their labor, rescues Eva when she falls into the river, and is variously described as an "Italian sailor," a "mariner shipwrecked," and a "half-drowned mariner."1 Nineteenth-century readers and artists noticed such associations, so why have scholars missed this dimension of the novel?2 The absence of critical consideration of Stowe's maritime references may have to do with the way scholars understand Tom's relation to domestic fiction. Stowe's enslaved hero is known for exhibiting the traits of a nineteenth-century heroine through his "gentle, pious, chaste, domestic, long-suffering and self-sacrificing" nature.3 This feminization allows contemporary readers to resolve the tensions that arise from depicting a black male protagonist through sentimental characteristics.4 However, there is more than one sentimental tradition in Uncle Tom's Cabin. References to Tom as a sailor show that Stowe also used maritime sentimentalism. Stowe became familiar with maritime culture through her uncle, Samuel Foote, a sea captain who brought home nautical tales to his relatives, including his favorite niece, Harriet.5 In her [End Page 47] famous novel Stowe rewrites one prominent character from antebellum sea narratives: the "sentimental sailor," a figure who also appears in various nineteenth-century genres. Rescuing those in physical peril, the sentimental sailor—a name I take from Thomas Mercer's eponymous 1772 poem—converted others to the golden rule and advocated liberty, charity, generosity, and kinship. For example, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's 1826 short story "The Chivalric Sailor" chronicles the adventures of Frank Stuart, a heroic Christian sailor who rescues the distressed, particularly Perdita, a young British noblewoman who is forced to work in a Maryland sea captain's scullery.6 When Stuart hears about Perdita's predicament, he smuggles her aboard a British-bound ship and hides her throughout their journey across the Atlantic. Stuart's nautical prowess and charitable deeds enable Perdita to gain her freedom upon their arrival in England. Many years later when Stuart becomes a privateer for John Paul Jones during the American Revolution, he ends up rescuing Perdita again. Stuart's vessel captures a British ship that Perdita is on, and he safely brings her home. Shortly after this incident, Perdita's husband repays Stuart for his deeds by saving him from the British navy. Thus, Sedgwick emphasizes how the sentimental sailor's rescues surpass even conflicts among nations. Like Sedgwick, many antebellum writers used sentimental sailors to promote nonnational forms of personal and collective identity.7 The conversions that these sailors' rescues prompted acquired multiple meanings: while the sentimental sailor in religious tracts evangelized the rescued to Christianity, writers who advocated for humanitarian issues used the sentimental sailor to enlist readers' support for abolition and mariners' rights. Although the sentimental sailor rose alongside sentimental literature in early America, literary critics have essentially ignored these heroic mariners, partly because scholars have defined nineteenth-century sentimentalism through the passive heroines of domestic [End Page 48] literature who promote religious conversion within the home. Yet recovering the sentimental sailor reveals that the maritime world also had a sentimental literary tradition, one that contradicted the sentimental heroine's nationalist goals by encouraging readers to adopt humanist values and see beyond their communities' cultural prejudices. Although sentimentalism prototypically incites sympathy, nineteenth-century sentimental texts have nationalist and imperialist tendencies. Amy Kaplan notes that domesticity is an "ambiguous liminal realm between the national and the foreign" and that the ship, a mobile domestic sphere, situates the ocean as an imperialist space.8 Yet Kaplan's focus on the woman's sphere and domesticity as a nationalist force does not acknowledge maritime sentimentalism. While ships are indeed domestic spaces, they represent a different type of social geography from houses because ships combine both the public and private spheres. Maritime sentimentalism, then, presents an alternative sentimental tradition that encodes an international perspective as well as nationalism and imperialism. The sentimental sailor's popularity indicates Americans' deep cultural awareness that creating an empire is...

Creeping in the Crevices: Geology and the Re-scaling of Women’s Mobility in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons

Creeping in the Crevices: Geology and the Re-scaling of Women’s Mobility in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons Dalia Davoudi Elizabeth Stoddard is a notoriously difficult writer to situate, both formally and ideologically. Her best-known novel, The Morgesons, wholly refuses the moral didactics of sentimental literature but cannot be neatly categorized into another generic tradition, and its tone and style are uncanny in a way that remains hard to compare with other writers of the nineteenth century. Tied to her literary idiosyncrasy is her well-documented political recalcitrance: “Are you a woman’s righter?” she wrote to Helen Hunt Jackson in 1870. “I hope not . . . Heavens! How humiliating to our sex all this business is!” (Stoddard to Hunt, 7 April 1870, 136). This sensibility, found across her nonfiction, has led critics to see Stoddard as rather unsisterly and fundamentally allergic to women’s reform movements and to understand the difficulties of placing Stoddard in a clear literary-historical tradition as a necessary part of her willfully marginal project.1 Scholars such as Stacy Alaimo, Carina Pasquesi, Julia Stern, and others have read Stoddard as a theorizer of the feminine psyche, celebrating her writing as queer, perverse, and productively antisocial.2 While these accounts importantly expand the scope of what we understand as feminist literary sensibilities of the period, the risk of seeing Stoddard’s work as fundamentally “dissociative” (109), to use Stern’s term, is that we miss how her writing productively confronts the norms of her period’s political culture. This essay reconsiders Stoddard’s relationship to women’s rights activism, understanding the tropes of degeneration in The Morgesons not as a wholesale refusal of women’s politics but rather as a reevaluation of its scope and scale. I argue that the thematization of creeping and crawling—often read as part of The Morgesons’s degenerative aesthetics—constitutes Stoddard’s critique of expanded-sphere politics, which were increasingly prevalent in women’s activism of her period, [End Page 213] and, more presciently, of the enduring discourse of mobility that drives the ethos of American politics. The Morgesons does have a knack for making one’s skin crawl. This effect is produced by the novel’s oddly subdued protagonist-narrator, Cassandra, and her sister, Veronica, who appears locked in an eternal but preternatural childhood; it undoubtedly lingers after the closing scene of the novel, in which Cassandra returns home after years of travel only to watch Veronica’s infant son as he “smiles continually, but never cries, never moves” (252). Characters themselves get the creeps: Cassandra explains that a woman she does not quite like “made my flesh creep” (168), and Temperance, a servant, gets “a creeping” feeling about Charles, Cassandra’s cousin, who eventually dies in a crash (63). Given the novel’s tendency toward the ominous, this pattern would appear to join a long list of gothic tropes that populate the text. But creeping and crawling also appear at an ecological register in the novel. Insects “crawl” (11), toads “crawl” (32), the sea “creep[s]” along the shore (63, 243)—and Cassandra observes them intently. I understand the nonhuman creeping found in descriptions of flies and stones to constitute the realist flip side of The Morgesons’s asocial, gothic affinities, showing that Stoddard adopts the pace of ecological creeping not only to break the telos of the Bildungsroman but also to confront the increasingly prevalent political rhetoric that equated women’s mobility with women’s freedom. In linking creeping as physiological constraint with creeping as ecological pace, I argue, Stoddard borrows from the interventions of emergent geological sciences to produce a singular feminist methodology. Stacy Alaimo has emblematically shown that while Cassandra’s excursions out of the familial home and across New England towns educate her in various ways, the novel also thematizes returns, regression, and failure, most overtly in Cassandra’s forced return to Surrey, her hometown. While one might read Stoddard as simply dealing in stock gothic tropes of entrapment, I argue that The Morgesons in fact intervenes in a reform culture that glorifies a spatial notion of an expanded sphere. Women’s reform activists at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 declared...

Tearing the Envelope: Harriet Jacobs’s “Epistolary Activism”

In her debut as an author in June 1853, Harriet Jacobs published a letter in the “New-York Tribune” in which she responded to a transatlantic epistolary exchange that took place between female antislavery supporters in Britain and former First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler. In this letter and via this transatlantic exchange, I argue, Jacobs was able to inscribe her racial and gendered position as an African American woman into the American body politic. Broadly construed, this essay wants to de-emphasize the dominance of the genre of the slave narrative in African American life writing, and to draw attention to the form and function of letter writing in American antislavery literature. In the context of Jacobs’s work, I argue, letter writing was not only a form of verification and authentication, but also a means of participating in a particular mode of communication that deliberately blurred the lines of the private and public, the amateur and professional, and the national and transnational. While Jacobs very much adhered to the protocols of sentimental literature in her 1861 slave narrative “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, we witness in this first published letter how she experiments with and realizes additional literary personae, complementing the figure of the fugitive slave with that of the political commentator and the female activist.

Risky short positions and investor sentiment: Evidence from the weekend effect in futures markets

AbstractThis paper examines the weekend effect in futures markets and presents rational and behavioral reasons for its existence. Specifically, we document a weekend effect (Friday's return minus the following Monday's return) in futures markets. The weekend effect occurs partly because of asymmetric risk between long and short positions around weekends; the weekend effect increases when short positions are relatively more risky. In addition, we find that both lagged and contemporaneous changes in investor sentiment are related to the weekend effect. These results are consistent with the investor sentiment literature that finds that mood improves on Fridays but deteriorates on Mondays.

Susanna Rowson’s Barbary Captivity Narrative, or the Struggle for the Freedom of American Women in Algiers

This research explores the feminist dimensions of Rowson's play, Slaves in Algiers or, a struggle for freedom (1794), from historicist and dialogical perspectives. More particularly, it looks at the play within the context of the politics of the early American republic to uncover how Rowson deploys the captivity of American sailors in Algiers (1785-1796) as a pretext to deconstrust the established gender power relations without hurting the sensibilities of her audience in its reference to the issue of black slavery. The research also unveils the many intertextual relationships that the play holds with the prevalent captivity culture of the day, sentimental literature, and more specifically with Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

Sentimental Avatars: Gender Identification and Vehicles of Selfhood in Popular Media From Nineteenth-Century Novels to Modern Video Games

This article examines how the embodied experience of contemporary avatar use overlaps with 19th-century American sentimental literature and cultural assumptions about gender and readerly identification in that period. Drawing on recent quantitative and qualitative research on avatar use and ongoing scholarship on nineteenth-century literature, we offer theoretical insights about the resonance between historical and contemporary understandings of media consumption as it intersects with cultural notions of sex and gender differences. Theories of sentimentalism help us to reconsider how gender is conceptualized in quantitative studies of avatars. Our cross-disciplinary study of embodiment and visceral experience thus argues for expanding modes of inquiry within quantitative games scholarship to more fully capture the interplay between gender identity and individual factors in avatar experiences. We conclude with three strategies for quantitative games scholars to consider as a means to enrich our understanding of the complexities of gender in modern game contexts.

Cultura popular, redes sociales y nuevas tecnologías: cambios en las subjetividades a través de los consumos culturales

El artículo expone una reseña del libro La intimidad p´ública de Beatriz Sarlo, reconocida ensayista argentina, licenciada en letras por la Universidad de Buenos Aires y especialista en el ámbito de la crítica literaria y cultural. El texto propone un recorrido a través de los géneros literarios centrales de la Argentina moderna para interesarse así por los cambios en la sexualidad, la sensualidad y las subjetividades que proponen el mundo del espectaculo mediático, las nuevas tecnologías y las redes sociales. A su vez, se hace hincapie sobre los distintos modelos de felicidad construidos por la literatura sentimental de principio del siglo XX y los géneros mediaticos del escándalo y el idilio de la maternidad. 

The Presence of the Dead among U.S. Protestants, 1800–1848

Historians have long known that antebellum American Protestants were fascinated by death, but they have overlooked Protestant relationships with the dead. Long before the advent of séance Spiritualism in 1848, many mourners began to believe—contrary to mainstream Protestant theology—that the souls of the dead turned into angels, that the dead could return to earth as guardian angels, and that in graveyards one could experience communion with the spirits of the departed. The version of Protestantism these mourners developed was therefore, to use Robert Orsi's term, a religion of “presence,” a religion in which suprahuman beings—in addition to God—played an important role. Based on diaries and popular sentimental literature written mostly by women, this article brings to light an unexplored facet of antebellum Protestant lived religion: that the dead were “present with us tho’ invisible,” as one young woman wrote about her deceased sister.

Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading: Print Culture and Popular Instruction in the Anglophone Atlantic World by Eve Tavor Bannet

Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading: Print Culture and Popular Instruction in the Anglophone Atlantic World by Eve Tavor Bannet Aileen Douglas Eve Tavor Bannet. Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading: Print Culture and Popular Instruction in the Anglophone Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2017. Pp. viii + 298. £75. Eighteenth-century guides to reading, such as Isaac Watts's extremely influential Improvement of the Mind (1741), often presented reading as akin to surveying and mapping, according to Ms. Bannet. The experience of reading her study is akin to seeing a well-known landscape from an unfamiliar angle—the top of a bus or a low-flying plane—occasionally surprising and undeniably satisfying. Manners of Reading aspires to delineate "common, once familiar, ideas and practices" of reading as recommended or presented in a varied range of eighteenth-century texts: copybooks, grammars, guides to study, periodical pieces, philosophical essays, and novels. Urging at the outset that the most illuminating way to think of eighteenth-century reading is in terms of "variously limited and extended literacies," Ms. Bannet ranges her six chosen "manners" of reading according to increased complexity. In chapter 1, plurality presents itself in the form of the eighteenth-century's multiple alphabets; she notes that eighteenth-century copy-books, such as those published by the engraver George Bickham, ordered variety without attempting to eliminate it. In relation to spellers, dictionaries, and grammars (approximately 155 grammars printed between 1750 and 1800) she again emphasizes diversity, remarking that even apparently authoritative works such as Johnson's Dictionary (1755) and Robert Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) reached readers in multiple ways, often in abridged or amended form. Spellers and grammars had priorities other than the promotion of a standardized English, including the teaching of syllabic reading and the conventions of analogic thinking, which, once again, allowed readers to manage variety. The popularization of the art of reading aloud, instructions for which were increasingly available to general readers, is the subject of the appealing second chapter. Pronouncing anthologies such as James Burgh's Art of Speaking (1761), William Scott's Lessons in Elocution (1779), and Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts (1784), provided passages of poetry and prose for daily practice. Ms. Bannet interestingly speculates that the demands in such works for readers to exercise sympathy "may have played a neglected role" in producing the taste for literary representations of the passions so crucial to sentimental literature at century's end. Chapter 3 turns to reading as study, with particular attention given to Watts's Improvement of the Mind, and Hester Chap-one's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773) as the most influential guides, noting how the intersection of chronology and geography was considered fundamental to a studious reader's retention of knowledge. One reason Manners of Reading is so informative is that it is constructed around, and driven by, often ignored primary sources. Throughout, the apparently artless methodology of the book provides detailed and impressive reconstructions of eighteenth-century recommendations to readers. In the book's final chapters, however, its boldness of conception and interpretative drive become much more apparent. The subject of chapter 4, "discontinuous reading," is not a term [End Page 99] readers in the eighteenth century would recognize, although they were almost certainly familiar with the practice. Borrowing the term from Peter Stallybrass, who uses it in describing the shift from scroll to codex, Ms. Bannet extends the designation to indicate a taste for "variety, discontinuity and the shock of novelty and surprise." This taste was satisfied by "miscellarian" writing as described and practiced by Shaftesbury in his Characteristicks (1711); by Addison, the "great theorist" of such writing, in The Spectator (1711–1714); and by Isaac D'Israeli in his Miscellanies (1796). Some works are conceived as miscellanies, but some have the miscellaneous thrust upon them. What most interests Ms. Bannet is the unruly energy of readers as they read discontinuously: reading the bits that appeal, skipping chapters, letting the eye glide over intractable matter. For her inclusion of novels under "miscellaneous," she can adduce several arguments: it was the classification often used for novels in reviews, many eighteenth-century novels are episodic...

Le charme sans la beauté, vie de Sophie Cottin by Silvia Lorusso

Reviewed by: Le charme sans la beauté, vie de Sophie Cottin by Silvia Lorusso John T. Booker Lorusso, Silvia. Le charme sans la beauté, vie de Sophie Cottin. Garnier, 2018. ISBN 978-2-406-08007-7. Pp. 356. Setting the stage for a forthcoming edition of Mme Cottin's complete works, this biography draws heavily on her correspondence, much of which also remains un-published. Raised in a well-to-do Protestant family, Cottin came of age at a time of sociopolitical upheaval, married the same month that the Revolution began, and so led a public life that was necessarily discreet. It is primarily through her letters, then, that Lorusso depicts her, "dans ses relations familiales, amoureuses, amicales; dans ses lectures et dans ses rencontres; dans sa résonance avec les événements de son époque" (15). Youthful exchanges with a cousin, Julie, her closest friend and lifelong correspon-dent, reveal an avid reader who found in Rousseau her "maître à penser" (23). In contrast to her cousin's marriage to a much older man, Cottin's was a happy union, though it would be cut short after just four years by the sudden death of her husband. For the rest of her own relatively brief life (she died at the age of thirty-seven), she devoted much of her time and energy to helping Julie raise her children, and to writing. Claire d'Albe, the first of the five novels to appear in her lifetime, and by far the best-known today, was published anonymously in 1799. Lorusso's basic approach as biographer, as one might expect, is to retrace the course of Cottin's life, pausing from time to time to treat more general topics, such as "Les grands maîtres de Sophie" (99–108) or "Sophie [End Page 264] et Julie" (199–203). Because the letters often lack a precise date, and in some instances even a clear indication of the intended recipient, Lorusso furnishes numerous footnotes, which at times are substantial enough to be a distraction. Unsurprisingly, the correspondence frequently touches on topics that play out in Cottin's novels, and extracts from her letters read at times very much like sentimental literature of the period. Lorusso documents both the undeniable popularity of the novels, which continued into the first third of the nineteenth century, and the "polémique littéraire posthume contre Sophie Cottin" (272) orchestrated by critics and by rival authors such as Mme de Genlis. In due course, it would be the harsh assessment of Sainte-Beuve, she notes, "qui jette le discrédit définitif sur l'œuvre de Mme Cottin" (287). One of the curious features of this biography, implicit in its title, is the preoccupation with Cottin's physical appearance: while she was not considered attractive by conven-tional standards, men clearly found her charming. Lorusso eventually devotes a substantial chapter to the issue—"Une femme fatale sans être belle" (109–30)—and interested readers will be able to form their own impressions, since reproductions of two portraits are included. This is a biography that is solidly researched, clearly written, and enjoyable to read. The end material is very substantial, with family trees, catalogs of existing manuscripts and editions, an extensive critical bibliography, and helpful indices. We can look forward now to the promised volume of Cottin's complete works. John T. Booker University of Kansas Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Marianne Noble, Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson

The title of Marianne Noble’s new book lays out unambiguously her bold ambition, which is no less than to “rethink sympathy and human contact.” After exploring The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature in her first monograph (2000), she now offers to investigate the ways in which four writers from the 1850s and 1860s – Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and Dickinson – revisited and revised their initial understanding of sympathy over the course of their careers. Her method consists in foc...

The Return to Sentimentalism in Antebellum Poetry Studies

The Return to Sentimentalism in Antebellum Poetry Studies Don James McLaughlin Antebellum American Women’s Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment. By Wendy Dasler Johnson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. vii + 265 pp. $40.00 paper. A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Edited by Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. v + 440 pp. $72.80 cloth. Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference. By Vivian R. Pollak. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. ix + 355 pp. $55.00 cloth. A 2017 headline reads: “Merriam-Webster tweets definition of ‘snowflake,’ which is somehow a political act” (PenzeyMoog). To scholars of the written word, the premise that dictionary definitions can be political will not seem outrageous. But the tweet did carry more than a little dramatic irony. It explained that the use of snowflake as an epithet, generally hurled by conservatives at left-wing activists championing diversity, has a deeper history. “In Missouri in the early 1860s,” Merriam-Webster wrote in a complementary article, “a ‘snowflake’ was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people” (Merriam-Webster). As Jessica Goldstein has shown, lay definitions on UrbanDictionary.com quickly made note of the revelation. [End Page 92] Above older definitions disparaging social justice advocates, a new, 2017 definition by a user named Lascaux Othello appeared: “Snowflake. Referring to someone, usually the Alt-Right, . . . whose immense white fragility causes a meltdown when confronted with the most minute deviation from orthodox White Supremacy. They often cry bloody murder when expected to give the most modest expression of basic human decency” (Othello). With a nod to the work of Robin DiAngelo, the definition makes snowflake the sign of “white fragility”: “a state” of “insulation” from “race-based stress,” characteristic of white communities in North America, “in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves” (DiAngelo 54). Characterized throughout the 2016 election and in its aftermath as an emblem of liberalism’s addiction to empathy and individuality, the snowflake has, in an amusing turn, been historicized as a rather on-the-nose symbol for the trolls most likely to use it. Yet the more immediate irony of the epithet, as a strategy for demeaning the left, should not be lost on us. No one has bemoaned the resilient sentimentalism of liberalism more than leftist scholars themselves. From Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005) to Susan Stryker’s 1994 manifesto on “transgender rage,” the Gay Shame movement’s resistance to the commercialization of LGBT Pride as exemplified by Halperin and Traub, and Wendy Brown’s critique of tolerance discourse in Regulating Aversion (2006), the imperative to sympathize has been a subject of critique for a long time. Citing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-seller as a prime example, Berlant observes in The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality (2008) that, while sentimental literature might elicit “fantasies” of political solidarity in readers, “the forces of distortion in the world of feeling politics that the citation of Uncle Tom puts into play are as likely to justify ongoing forms of domination as they are to give form and language to impulses toward resistance” (40–41). Such literature sets a low bar, in other words, by which fantasies of justice tend to become an end in and of themselves. And yet, against this familiar critique, a movement in scholarship un-allergic to the moniker of the sentimentalist has also been experiencing a resurgence as of late. Here, in a form of what Michel Foucault calls “reverse discourse,” a certain snowflakery is being recuperated (101).1 The new scholarship invested in reclaiming sentiment continues to derive momentum from literature of the eighteenth century and antebellum period—eras in which sentimentalism served as a crucible for public opinion and revolutions in governmentality. Ramesh Mallipeddi’s Spectacular Suffering thus encourages scholars “to loosen the grip of ideological critique” in order “to engage more fully with sentimental mediations of slave suffering” (23). To dismiss sentimental appeals for political recognition [End...

Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History ed. by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi

Reviewed by: Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History ed. by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi Ellen Mayock Delgado, Luisa Elena, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi, eds. Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2016. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-08-2652-086-9. The turn to the study of emotions and affect is most welcome, as it demands multi- and interdisciplinary approaches and, in many cases, questions the cynicism so rife in the postmodern era. Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History therefore arrives at a propitious moment in Spanish literary, film, and cultural studies and serves as an outstanding study on "the history and critical interpretation of the emotions in relation to modern Spain, considering their evolution and their social and cultural significance from the second half of the eighteenth century to the present" (1). Several of the essays place Spain in the broader context of Latin America and Europe, thus moving the notion of "Spanish" beyond Spain's national and/or geographic boundaries. [End Page 186] The volume consists of an introduction by the co-editors and fifteen individually authored essays. Because the editors want "to stress that emotions are historically conditioned" (6), the essays are organized in chronological order according to the year(s) of production of the works examined. The introduction defines the contours of the study of emotions, establishes key terms (e.g. "emotion"; "affect"; "sensation"; "feeling"; and "thought" [5-6]) and demonstrates nuances of meaning from language to language, provides a theoretical framework, and summarizes the main themes of the book. These main themes include the sense-emotion continuum (body-mind); the performative nature of emotion; the emotional connections between writers and readers; the race and gender implications in the expression of emotion; the role of emotion in the construction of self; historical memory; and the tension in politics between and among reason, passion, and empathy. While the introduction makes for an excellent primer on the understanding of sense and sensibility in Spanish cultural texts, the body of the volume could easily serve as the basis of an advanced seminar on eighteenth through twenty-first century Spanish cultural studies. Mónica Bolufer treats texts as diverse as sentimental literature, political and legal reports, and memoirs to examine how language "at once managerial and exploratory" navigates sensibility and emotion (Plamper cited on p. 24). The volume moves to the early nineteenth century with Wadda C. Ríos-Font's essay, "'How Do I Love Thee'. The Rhetoric of Patriotic Love in Puerto Rican Discourse," in which the author underscores the linguistic freight of patriotism and its link to emotion and empathy. Pura Fernández writes a compelling analysis of Agustín Pérez Zaragoza's 1831 Galería fúnebre, emphasizing the play between public and private, introspection and extroversion, through Weber's notion of the "emotional community." In her well-documented essay, Rebecca Haidt writes about "emotional contagion" in the medical context of nineteenth-century Spain, looking specifically at the elements of sympathy and humanity in the parsing of hygiene directives of the era. Lou Charnon-Deutsch's essay shines in its ability to connect nineteenth-century Spanish politics to twenty-first-century world politics, employing Sara Ahmed's theory of hatred in the contact between bodies (95) to examine the representation of Jews, Freemasons, and Jesuits in various legal documents. Rafael Huertas picks up the medical thread of the volume as he studies the representation of emotion in asylum texts from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. In her magisterial essay on "cinematic experience in 1920s Spain," Juli Highfill compares potential cinematic experiences in a poem (Pedro Salinas), a short story (Francisco Ayala), and a film (Elías Riquelme). No expansive volume would be complete without a section on the Spanish Civil War, and Engaging Emotions does not disappoint. Javier Krauel's essay looks at the influence of emotions and liberal institutions in the press during the Second Republic and makes viable comparisons between Marxist and Falange rhetoric. Maite Zubiaurre transports the reader a few years into the future by investigating how female frigidity and erotic emotion are mapped in...

The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion

Book Review| January 01 2017 The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion. By Claudia Stokes. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 296 pp. Cloth, $59.95. Hal Bush, Jr. Hal Bush, Jr. Saint Louis University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2017) 49 (2): 182–183. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.49.2.0182 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Hal Bush; The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion. American Literary Realism 1 January 2017; 49 (2): 182–183. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.49.2.0182 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History ed. by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi

Reviewed by: Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History ed. by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi Irene Domingo Delgado, Luisa Elena, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi, eds. Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2016. 312 pp. In his contribution to Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, Javier Moscoso points out that the thriving scholarly approach to the history [End Page 196] of emotions faces, among others, theoretical, terminological, methodological, cognitive, and ontological obstacles (176–78). Aware of these difficulties, the present volume undertakes a coherent interdisciplinary, trans-chronological, and transnational investigation into the emotions of modern Spain (because of its more common usage, “emotions” is the editors’ preferred and all-encompassing term to refer to what are sometimes called “affects,” “feelings,” “instincts,” or “impulses”). Summoning the work of fifteen top Hispanists and one writer, the volume engages in a wide range exploration of emotions and their manifestations, filling a gap in a field of research that, as its editors, Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi point out, has so far been insufficiently devoted to the study of Spain. The collected essays present the academic reader with a compelling overview of theoretical and critical approaches, challenges and problems, as well as complexities, angles, and potentialities existing in the study of emotions regarding Spain. Taking up the definition of emotions elaborated upon in the introduction as historically-bound, performative, socio-cultural practices, the volume explores the expression of emotions from an interdisciplinary point of view that does away with outdated dualities such as mind/body, social/individual, male/female, public/private, culture/nature, while, at the same time, breathing life into Spanish history. The chapters are organized chronologically. Opening the volume’s studies, Mónica Bolufer’s analysis of sentimental literature guides her exposition of the Enlightenment’s code of sensibility. Until the end of the eighteenth century, which saw the shift into the dualistic vision of emotions characteristic of Romanticism, sentiments were considered feelings of affection balanced with reason, and the basis for moral judgment essential for the preservation of a prosperous society. In the second chapter, taking a transnational perspective, Wadda C. Ríos-Font examines another transformation: that of the patriotism displayed in the discourse of Puerto Rico’s first representative at the Cortes de Cádiz, Ramón Power y Giralt, whose patriotic love of Spain, understood as a transatlantic nation, was displaced to Puerto Rico’s land (país) when he felt estranged by the mother/fatherland. Moving into the nineteenth century, Pura Fernández reads Agustín Pérez Zaragoza’s Galería fúnebre as a gallery of obscure emotions such as fear and pain that helped his ideal readers––active, empathic, and female––read with the body; that is, physically experience terror in the privacy of their rooms as a way of being trained to confront other life dangers. Rebecca Haidt’s essay investigates the discourses by Christian writer Concepción Arenal and hygienicists Pedro Felipe Monclau and Francisco Méndez Álvaro. As Haidt demonstrates, their writings show how, despite disagreeing about the extent to which the State needed to intervene to fight cholera, following the Enlightened sensibility—that is, bridging the moral and physical, as well as individual and social realms—they all agreed on the importance of managing emotions for social regenerative purposes. In her piece, Lou Charnon-Deutsch analyzes the hatred against Jews, Freemasons, and Jesuits as displayed in the imaginary representations of them appearing in nineteenth-century conspiracy novels, and situates this stereotyping in the context of a new world in which wealth was becoming increasingly powerful. [End Page 197] Rafael Huertas inspects the letters written by patients in the mental asylum of Leganés between 1860 and 1936. Despite having never reached their addressees, these letters provide today’s reader with a vast range of emotions, especially those of melancholia and paranoia, the two most common characteristics of those who suffer from alienation. Huertas’s chapter provides the additional function of ushering the reader out of the nineteenth century, as the following five chapters are dedicated to the twentieth. Juli Highfill’s reading...

2015 George Richardson Lecture

Anthony Benezet (1713–84) is familiar to historians of slavery, abolition and Quakerism for his important role in disseminating Pennsylvanian Quaker antislavery to a wider and ecumenical audience. This article argues that an important reason for this success was Benezet’s considered deployment of a fashionable sentimental rhetoric, or rhetoric of sensibility, that allowed him to reach out to wide audiences and to engage them both through their reason and through their emotions. This strategy enhanced Benezet’s ability to encourage the Quaker discourse of antislavery, as it had developed over a century, to inform Atlantic discourses more widely. To support this argument, the article demonstrates that, in his time and for some time afterwards, Benezet was regarded by many as a man of feeling in terms familiar from contemporary sentimental literature. It concludes by closely reading a selection of passages from his antislavery writing to show that, while Benezet’s rhetoric was by no means purely sentimental,...

Stokes, Claudia. The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 296 pp. $59.95 (cloth).

Stokes, Claudia. <i>The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion</i>. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 296 pp. $59.95 (cloth).

The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion by Claudia Stokes

The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion by Claudia Stokes

The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion. Claudia Stokes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 281.

<i>The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion</i>. Claudia Stokes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 281.

Communities of Death: Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning

Whereas some critics view Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman as writers who rejected the popular sentimentalism of nineteenth-century America, Adam Bradford takes issue with that approach, pointing out various ways in which Poe and Whitman “created, disseminated, and expected their work to be read within the literary, interpretive, and cultural registers provided by” sentimental expression (6). An important characteristic of this mode is a “preoccupation with death and mourning,” subjects that fascinated Poe and Whitman, but these writers share more than mere thematic material with their sentimentalist counterparts (7). According to Bradford, nineteenth-century mourning practices involved not only the expression of grief but also the pursuit of comfort through communal memorializing, and these consolatory endeavors shaped sentimental literature as well as Poe's and Whitman's writings about death. Noting that Poe associated poetic expression with the longing for immortality, Bradford interprets texts such as “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Premature Burial” as pieces that “inspire a reader to think about and to desire what Poe characterized … as ‘the glories beyond the grave’” (49). Read along these lines, such writings and sentimental literature bear striking similarities, and as Bradford suggests, Poe's interest in the healing powers of writing influenced Whitman, who wrote mourning verse and employed sentimental devices such as apostrophes in his journalism as well as in his poetry. Bradford also finds evidence of Whitman's debts to his sentimentalist forebears in the poet's writings about war and national reconciliation.Communities of Death contains effective commentary on Whitman, and there is plenty of evidence to link the good, gray poet, whose early works included a number of sentimental pieces, to popular forms associated with what Bradford calls the “culture of mourning and memorializing”; but the case for reading Poe as a sentimental writer is less compelling (22). For example, Bradford does not offer strong evidence that Poe wrote “The Raven” in order to solace the bereaved, and, indeed, the poem, with its recurring “Nevermore,” presents little hope for a reunion for lovers beyond the grave. Acknowledging that this poem does not, on the surface, seem thematically consonant with affirmative mourning poems in the sentimental vein, lyrics that mention joyous reunions with lost loved ones in a Christian heaven, Bradford notes that many antebellum readers of “The Raven” nevertheless interpreted this poem along such lines. Such responses may be unreliable guides for discerning Poe's intentions, and nineteenth-century efforts to make “The Raven” a consolation piece through (mis)reading or actual rewriting, some of which efforts Bradford discusses in detail, appear perverse. More problematic, Bradford does not mention other poems such as “The Conqueror Worm” and “Ulalume,” to name only two, in which death is a terrifying reality before which conventional consolations seem powerless.Equally questionable are Bradford's interpretations of Gothic stories through which Poe supposedly tried “to bring his readers to a sense of their immortal nature and to inspire them to imagine a transcendent afterlife” (55). Illustrating how Poe pursued these ends, Bradford analyzes “The Premature Burial.” In this tale, the narrator initially appears to describe the experience of being buried alive. For Bradford, these descriptions frighten readers, whom Poe expected “to actively wrestle with and resist such horror” before turning elsewhere for solace, and his terror tale has an inspirational effect (59). This effect is, Bradford argues, part of “Poe's [conscious] design for such literature” (67). This interpretation does not, however, adequately account for the surprising conclusion of “The Premature Burial,” in which the narrator mentions waking and discovering that his harrowing experience was only a dream. With this ending, Poe warns readers against putting too much faith in sensory experience and personal visions. Such a tale, the expression of a skeptical mind, seems an unlikely source of comfort for readers seeking the certainties of faith. Bradford does not offer close readings of other Poe tales, and for some reason he omits references to angelic dialogues such as “The Conversation of Eiros and Charimon” and “The Colloquy of Monos and Una.” Both texts deal with the afterlife, a subject of great import to sentimental writers who produced mourning verse.Such criticisms aside, Communities of Death offers an intriguing record of contemporary responses to Poe's writings, and Bradford's interest in textual reception helps readers understand the milieu in which Poe operated. Truly impressive, however, are Bradford's interpretations of Whitman, which include considerations of the bindings and typographical features of the poet's publications. Supplementing this commentary on matters related to print culture are Bradford's close readings of paintings and other mourning objects that offer readers of the twenty-first century insights into the nineteenth-century work of memorializing the dead. Most important, Bradford relies on the sound assumption that understanding Poe and Whitman requires learning more about the discursive powers shaping the worlds they knew.