Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture

First printing. An excellent copy. 1999 Trade Paperback. ix, 288 pp. "The essays in this volume analyze a wide variety of cultural forms to demonstrate the centrality of masculine sentiment in American literary and cultural history from the early republic to the progressive era. Challenging the association of sentimentality exclusively with femininity in studies of American culture, the contributors analyze sentimentalism not just as a literary genre but as a structure of feeling manifested in many areas: temperance testimonials, begging letters, historiography, philanthropic performance, photography, portraiture, and poetry. Essays from a variety of disciplines--American studies, literature, history, art, gender studies--deconstruct the alignment of reason, commerce, and the public sphere with men, and feelings, domesticity, and the private sphere with women." CONTENTS: List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler; DOMESTIC MEN: Fireside Chastity: The Erotics of Sentimental Bachelorhood in the 1850's, Vincent J. Bertolini; Feeling for the Fireside: Longfellow, Lynch, and the Topography of Poetic Power, Kristen Silva Gruesz; Then When We Clutch Hardest: On the Death of a Child and the Replication of an Image, Karen Sanchez-Eppler; PUBLIC SENTIMENT: The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic, 1790-1820, John Saillant; Remembering Metacom: Historical Writing and the Cultures of Masculinity in Early Republican America, Philip Gould; Bloated Bodies and Sober Sentiments: Masculinity in 1840's Temperance Narratives, Glenn Hendler; Sentimental Abolition in Douglass's Decade: Revision, Erotic Conversion, and the Politics of Witnessing in The Heroic Slave and My Bondage and My Freedom, P. Gabrielle Foreman; Chivalric Sentimentalism: The Case of Dr. Howe and Laura Bridgman; The Gaze of Success: Failed Men and the Sentimental Marketplace, 1873-1893, Scott A. Sandage; CANONICAL SENTIMENTS: Masochism and Male Sentimentalism: Charles Brockden Brown's Clara Howard, Bruce Burgett; Sentimental and Romantic Masculinities in Moby-Dick and Pierre, Tara Penry; Sentimental Realism in Thomas Eakin's Late Portraits, Martin A. Berger; Sentimental Tentacles: Frank Norris's The Octopus, Francesca Sawaya; Notes on Contributors; Index.…