Table of Contents

Introduction, Mary De Jong
Part One: Rethinking Sentimental Motherhood
“These Human Flowers”: Sentimentalizing Children and Fashioning Maternal Authority in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Kara Clevinger“The Medicine of Sympathy”: Maternal Affective Pedagogy in Antebellum America,” Ken ParilleThe Ethics of Postbellum Melancholy in the Poetry of Sarah Piatt, D. Zachary FinchPart Two: The Politics of Sentimentality
“The Language of the Eye”: Communication and Sentimental Benevolence in Lydia Sigourney’s Poems and Essays about the Deaf, Elizabeth PetrinoLydia Maria Child’s Use of Sentimentalism in Letters from New-York, Susan Toth LordSympathetic Jo: Tomboyism, Poverty, and Race in Alcott’s Little Women, Kristen Proehl
Part Three: Loss, Death, Mourning and Grief

Desired and Imagined Loss as Sympathetic Identification: Bachelor Melancholia in Donald Grant Mitchell’s Reveries of a Bachelor, Maglina LubovichThe Collaborative Construction of a Death-Defying Cryptext: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Adam Bradford“Such Verses for My Body Let Us Write”: Civil War Song, Sentimentalism, and Whitman’s Drum-Taps, Robert ArbourPsychological Sentimentalism: Consciousness, Affect, and the Sentimental Henry James, George Gordon-Smith
Afterword, Mary Louise Kete

Works Cited
Contributors

About the Author

Mary G. De Jong is associate professor of English and Women's Studies at Penn State Altoona.

Reviews

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.
*Choice Reviews*

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.
*Year's Work in English Studies*