Bloomsbury Academic The Logic of Sentiment: Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville

What holds us together? This is a basic question, a human question, given especial force by the disenchantment of the world that characterizes modern attitudes. Sentimentalitys answer is that we must be enchanted by sympathy, by seeking to know what others know and what others feel. Kenneth Daubers Sentimentality is the first long history of sentimentality in American literature. It begins, and deals primarily, with the novels of mid 19th-century America, where sentimentality achieved its most complete articulation, by foundational writers such as Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Along the way, Dauber also provides a guide through evolving views on sentimentality in philosophy and cultural studies. What becomes clear, and is at the revelatory heart of this book, is that by understanding the urge to be sentimental, and what sentimentality entails, we can also better understand its opposite: skepticism, lack of empathy, or from a literary history perspective, the literary movements of the 19th and 20th century that were in some ways reactions against sentimentality: most prominently realism and modernism and, later, postmodernism. Whilst offering a unique perspective on American literature, Sentimentality also speaks to the broader question of different ways of reading and thinking and to what we feel when we read.