Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America

Edited by Mary G. De Jong

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 War's explosion of the faith in universal feelings and ideas on which sentimentalism was based.

Introduction, Mary De JongPart One: Rethinking Sentimental Motherhood1."These Human Flowers": Sentimentalizing Children and Fashioning Maternal Authority in Godey's Lady's Book, Kara Clevinger2."The Medicine of Sympathy": Maternal Affective Pedagogy in Antebellum America," Ken Parille3.The Ethics of Postbellum Melancholy in the Poetry of Sarah Piatt, D. Zachary FinchPart Two: The Politics of Sentimentality4."The Language of the Eye": Communication and Sentimental Benevolence in Lydia Sigourney's Poems and Essays about the Deaf, Elizabeth Petrino5.Lydia Maria Child's Use of Sentimentalism in Letters from New-York, Susan Toth Lord6.Sympathetic Jo: Tomboyism, Poverty, and Race in Alcott's Little Women, Kristen ProehlPart Three: Loss, Death, Mourning and Grief7.Desired and Imagined Loss as Sympathetic Identification: Bachelor Melancholia in Donald Grant Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor, Maglina Lubovich8.The Collaborative Construction of a Death-Defying Cryptext: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Adam Bradford9."Such Verses for My Body Let Us Write": Civil War Song, Sentimentalism, and Whitman's Drum-Taps, Robert Arbour10.Psychological Sentimentalism: Consciousness, Affect, and the Sentimental Henry James, George Gordon-SmithAfterword, Mary Louise KeteWorks CitedContributors