Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

A radical new interpretation of nineteenth-century sentimental literature in the United States.

Cindy Weinstein (Author)

9780521842532, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 December 2004

256 pages
23.6 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.535 kg

"Weinstein seems motivated not only by a genuine curiosity regarding the odd repetitions in so many of these sentimental novels--she reads with a keenly-tuned sensibility, picking up an astonishing number of echoing phrases and plot lines--but also by the desire for less hostile readings of sentimental fiction than we have seen lately." - Kristin Boudreau, The University of Georgia Studies in American Fiction

In Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Cindy Weinstein radically revises our understanding of nineteenth-century sentimental literature in the United States. She argues that these novels are far more complex than critics have suggested. Rather than confirming the power of the bourgeois family, Weinstein argues, sentimental fiction used the destruction of the biological family as an opportunity to reconfigure the family in terms of love rather than consanguinity. Their texts intervened in debates about slavery, domestic reform and other social issues of the time. Weinstein shows how canonical texts, such as Melville's Pierre and works by Stowe and Twain, can take on new meaning when read in the context of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. Through intensive close readings of a wide range of novels, this groundbreaking study demonstrates the aesthetic and political complexities in this important and influential genre.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. In loco parentis
2. 'A sort of adopted daughter': family relations in The Lamplighter
3. Thinking through sympathy: Kemble, Hentz, and Stowe
4. Behind the scenes of sentimental novels: Ida May and Twelve Years a Slave
5. Love American style: The Wide, Wide World
6. We are family, or Melville's Pierre
Afterword
Notes
Select bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]