... Sentimental Fiction MARIANNE NOBLE, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 240, cloth, $55.00, paper, $18.95. When James Baldwin pronounced Uncle Tom's Cabin "a very bad novel," his condemnation was not merely aesthetic. For Baldwin...

...Kyoko Takanashi Taking Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey as a case study, this article explores how mid-eighteenth-century novels of sensibility theorized mediation—and by extension, the very act of reading. Sentimental fiction draws attention to the instability of individual feeling...

... with sentimental fiction, the novel of prejudice draws on Enlightenment theories of toleration to develop a narrative focus on the self-critical and complicit conscience. © 2010 by Novel, Inc. 2010 The Novel and Prejudice Sarah Winter In Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues...

...Sean McCann LEONARD CASSUTO, Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories (New York: Columbia UP, 2008), pp. 344, cloth, $79.50, paper, $13.75. © 2010 by Novel, Inc. 2010 Love and Death in Detective Fiction leonard cassuto, Hard-Boiled...

... readers to "reel the world home," including tales told by objects, anti-slavery medallions, and the Abbe de Raynaf's Histoire des Dew lrzdes (2). Chapter 1 thus approaches the question of sentimental fiction indirectly, through mid- century theories of sympathy developed by David Hume, Adam...

... fiction. According to Cindy Weinstein’s recent book, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth- Century American Literature, the sentimental novel does need to be rescued, this time from scholars who have taken their inspiration not from Tompkins but from Ann Douglas’s The Feminization...

... of nineteenth-century women's fiction, Ashley Reed argues against the critical tyranny of secularization. Indeed, the book's critical occasion lies in Reed's belief that secular and liberal modes of thought have shaped—and distorted—the study of American women's writing in general and the sentimental novel...

... this as an indication that white support for Black Lives Matter was only ever fickle and thin. In May 2020 Percival Everett published a novel that contests the reduction of activist sentiment to social outcomes. Telephone tells the story of a Black man, Zach Wells, who struggles to come to terms with his daughter's...

... regardless of the thoughts or feelings that might attend it and muddy the interpretive waters. The downside: farewell, thoughts and feelings. It is hard to imagine a sentimental fiction devoid of those things, which is why the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph counts as an inversion of that fiction’s...

... human” (20). Finally, we need to return to the narratives of sentimental fiction, recognized now as high-end laboratories of emotion. Uncomfortable Situations advances on all three fronts—wrestling with scientists, deploying rhetorical analysis and learning from sentimental narratives—more or less...

... considers a broader swath of the scholarship than is referenced here. The chapter does, however, include a suggestive application of Stanley Fish's concept of the "interpre- tive community" to the reception history of sentimental fiction (145). The epilogue on Steme, whose work Goring presents...

... . Howells , William Dean . Criticism and Fiction . New York: Harper, 1891 . Kolodny , Annette . Introduction. The Blithedale Romance . By Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Penguin, 1982 . Merish , Lori . Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century...

... feminine consumption" (6). Consumption allows women access to a form of "subjective expression and civic identification" in a culture ambivalent about women's public voices and their self-culture (2). Reading a range of sentimental fictions from Foster's The Coquette, Caroline Kirkland's A New Home...

... of sentimental fiction" (203) akin to Captain Delano himself, whose racism intensifies with every increase in his "sympathy to the negro" (Tawil quot- ing Melville, 200). Thus, in the course of its powerful argument for Benito Cereno as a pointed mmment upon Uncle Tom's Cabin, the study unwittingly...

... time” (178). By contrast, Smith sees Uncle Tom's Cabin as at once a powerful work of political persuasion and a turn away from the public, a form of “domestication.” Addressing her audience in the familiar terms of sentimental fiction, Stowe appealed to an audience that “imagined itself...

... narrated-amatory fiction, sentimental fiction, Tris tram Shandy-play an important role in Nussbaum's study. She points to Shaftesbury's wndem- nation of the feminine taste for fabulous tales, itself a reiteration of wlute male anxiety about Othello's ability to attract women with his spicy stories...

... narrative, sea yarn, military adventure, ethnographic reportage, historical fiction, travelogue, picaresque saga, sentimental novel, allegory, tall tale, pastoral origin myth, Gothic romance, conversion tale, and abolitionist tract" (19)? It's more than likely that an eighteenth-century...

... offers a literary genre (sentimental fiction and the bildungsroman, respectively) as the catalyst for the political achievement of consensus around human rights. The relationship in Anker's study is deeply fraught by competing visions of the individual subject and a deep frustration expressed by all four...

... , Thomas . “Sentimental Fiction: Ethics, Social Critique, and Philanthropy.” The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 . Ed. John Richetti. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005 . 572 –601. Lamb , Jonathan . “Political Theories of the Self.” Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680...

... that the effects she examines extend messily beyond generic confines not only within but beyond the novel. Sentimental fiction, too, merits mention as playing deliberately through metafictional references and multiple narrative frames with the notion of wonders hidden from the mercenary world and perceptible only...