Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature - Softcover

Hendler, Glenn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807849219 ISBN 13: 9780807849217

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001

Synopsis

In this book, Glenn Hendler explores what he calls the "logic of sympathy" in novels by Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, T. S. Arthur, Martin Delany, Horatio Alger, Fanny Fern, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells. For these nineteenth-century writers, he argues, sympathetic identification was not strictly an individual, feminizing, and private feeling but the quintessentially public sentiment--a transformative emotion with the power to shape social institutions and political movements.

Uniting current scholarship on gender in nineteenth-century American culture with historical and theoretical debates on the definition of the public sphere in the period, Hendler shows how novels taught diverse readers to "feel right," to experience their identities as male or female, black or white, middle or working class, through a sentimental, emotionally based structure of feeling. He links novels with such wide-ranging cultural and political discourses as the temperance movement, feminism, and black nationalism. Public Sentiments demonstrates that, whether published for commercial reasons or for higher moral and aesthetic purposes, the nineteenth-century American novel was conceived of as a public instrument designed to play in a sentimental key.

About this title

Book Description

"Offers many fascinating insights into nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Hendler's readings of classic and lesser-known texts are invariably creative, sophisticated and erudite."-- Journal of the Early Republic

From the Inside Flap

Shows how novels by Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, T. S. Arthur, Martin Delany, Horatio Alger, Fanny Fern, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells taught readers to experience their identities as male or female, black or white, middle or working class, through a sentimental, emotionally based structure of feeling.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0807849219
• ISBN 13: 9780807849217
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288