Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America Literary and Cultural Practices [Hardcover]

De Jong, coeditor (with Earl Yarington) of Popular Nineteeth-Century Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace (2007), has brought together ten essays on sentimentalism in American literature and culture. The contributions--most by rising scholars--are grouped into three sections: Rethinking Sentimental Motherhood, Reform and Sympathetic Identification, and Loss, Death, Mourning, and Grief. The diversity of the essays supports De Jong's main assertions: contemporary criticism views sentimentalism as a protean term applicable to literary and nonliterary forms; sentimentalism characterizes works representing liberal, progressive, and reactionary stances; and the concept is associated not solely with femininity. Several essays focus on men: novelist Donald Grant Mitchell and poets Walt Whitman and Henry James, who all dealt with sentimentality. Mary Louise Kete, author of Sentimental Collaborations, contributes an illuminating afterword (which could well have substituted for De Jong's less cogent introduction) contextualizing the essays and offering an overview of current scholarship. Especially significant is Kete's discussion of sympathy ( the definitive affect of sentiment ) and its relationship to the liberal self. This collection offers thoughtful readings of the texts considered, although the essays as a whole do not advance any particular overarching argument. Summing Up: Recommended. For collections serving graduate students and researchers.These essays make important claims for connections between sentimentalism and realism and modernism. As a whole, the collection reaffirms the centrality of the mode to nineteenth-century American literature, and suggests that the limits of sentimentalism stretch further than is usually acknowledged.Tracing the eighteenth-century origins of sentimentalism, the collection illustrates its proliferation in nineteenth-century America. Contributors explore motherhood, education, reform, loss and mourning, and the Civil Warl#¾