Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson

Analyzes the evolution of antebellum literary explorations of sympathy and human contact in the 1850s and 1860s.

Marianne Noble (Author)

9781108481335, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 March 2019

306 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.64 kg

'Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact joins a wider and important conversation about the ways in which literature imagines togetherness and the functions of sentiments, emotions, and affects within these emplotments.' Thomas Constantinesco, The Emily Dickinson International Society

In accessible and impassioned discussions of literature and philosophy, this book reveals a surprising approach to the intractable problem of human contact. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson rethought the nature of human contact, turning away from transcendentalist approaches and towards sympathetic ones. Their second and third works portray social masks as insufficient, not deceptive, and thus human contact requires not violent striking through the mask but benevolent skepticism towards persons. They imagine that people feel real in a real world with real others when they care for others for the other's sake and when they make caring relationships the cornerstone of their own being. Grounded in philosophies of sympathy - including Adam Smith and J. G. Herder - and relational psychology - Winnicott and Benjamin - Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature shows that antebellum literature rejects individualist definitions of the human and locates the antidote to human disconnection in sympathy.

Introduction
1. Transcendental approaches to human contact
2. 'Some true relation': the evolution of Hawthorne's understanding of human contact
3. 'The sentiment of justice must revolt in every heart': Frederick Douglass, white empathy, and the humanity of black autobiography
4. 'All the vivacities of life lie in differences': abrasive sympathy after Uncle Tom's Cabin
5. 'Sweet skepticism of the heart”: Dickinson's sympathetic phenomenology.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]