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Editorial Reviews
Review
“[C]ast[s] important light not only on American culture as a whole, but also on one significant aspect of some of Twain’s most important work.”
--Gregg Camfield, Mark Twain Forum
“[An] ambitious addition to scholarship on 19th-century American sentimentalism. . . . Recommended. . . .”
--M. L. Robertson, Choice
“[Kete writes] in a meaningful way across disciplines about shared disciplinary concerns of cultural authority and the links among texts, objects, and ideology.”
--Ann Schofield, American Studies
“[C]ommendably ambitious . . . .”
--Mary Loeffelholz, American Literature
“This is a book that all scholars . . . who study both the past and the present can enjoy and admire. It convincingly argues that a study of the neglected and patronised sentimental tradition can reveal the importance of grief in the private lives of many past Americans and show these experiences are an essential part of past and present middle-class culture.”
--Tom Dunning, Australasian Journal of American Studies
“[A]n intriguing reevaluation of the function of poetry and fiction in nineteenth-century American culture. . . . Sentimental Collaborations prompts historians and literary critics to rethink their assessments about the sequence and pervasiveness of American individualism as well as attitudes toward death and mourning.”
--Journal of the Early Republic
"Mary Louise Kete's bold critical work, Sentimental Collaborations, offers a radically new historicist methodology. . . . A unique and well-written work, Sentimental Collaborations contributes most importantly to the study of nineteenth-century American poetry with its methodology. Additionally, Kete's insight into the poetry of these ordinary Vermontians, and into the aesthetic values of what might constitute a class of people whose ambition is ordinariness, is striking and innovative, and offers great excitement to those in the field. Sentimental Collaborations belongs on the reading list of anyone interested in new ideas about poetry and American culture, as well as anyone interested in dynamic approaches to literary study."
--Elizabeth Dill, Rocky Mountain Review
Product Description
During the 1992 Democratic Convention and again while delivering Harvard University’s commencement address two years later, Vice President Al Gore shared with his audience a story that showed the effect of sentiment in his life. In telling how an accident involving his son had provided him with a revelation concerning the compassion of others, Gore effectively reconstructed himself as a typical, middle-class American for whom sympathy can lead to salvation. This contemporary reiteration of mid-nineteenth-century American sentimental discourse proves to be a fruitful point of departure for Mary Louise Kete’s argument that sentimentality has been an important and recurring form of cultural narrative that has helped to shape middle-class American life.
Many scholars have written about the sentimental novel as a primarily female genre and have stressed its negative ideological aspects. Kete finds that in fact many men—from writers to politicians—participated in nineteenth-century sentimental culture. Importantly, she also recovers the utopian dimension of the phenomenon, arguing that literary sentimentality, specifically in the form of poetry, is the written trace of a broad cultural discourse that Kete calls “sentimental collaboration”—an exchange of sympathy in the form of gifts that establishes common cultural or intellectual ground. Kete reads the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney with an eye toward the deployment of sentimentality for the creation of Americanism, as well as for political and abolitionist ends. Finally, she locates the origins of sentimental collaboration in the activities of ordinary people who participated in mourning rituals—writing poetry, condolence letters, or epitaphs—to ease their personal grief.
Sentimental Collaborations significantly advances prevailing scholarship on Romanticism, antebellum culture, and the formation of the American middle class. It will be of interest to scholars of American studies, American literature, cultural studies, and women’s studies.
See all Editorial Reviews
“[C]ast[s] important light not only on American culture as a whole, but also on one significant aspect of some of Twain’s most important work.”
--Gregg Camfield, Mark Twain Forum
“[An] ambitious addition to scholarship on 19th-century American sentimentalism. . . . Recommended. . . .”
--M. L. Robertson, Choice
“[Kete writes] in a meaningful way across disciplines about shared disciplinary concerns of cultural authority and the links among texts, objects, and ideology.”
--Ann Schofield, American Studies
“[C]ommendably ambitious . . . .”
--Mary Loeffelholz, American Literature
“This is a book that all scholars . . . who study both the past and the present can enjoy and admire. It convincingly argues that a study of the neglected and patronised sentimental tradition can reveal the importance of grief in the private lives of many past Americans and show these experiences are an essential part of past and present middle-class culture.”
--Tom Dunning, Australasian Journal of American Studies
“[A]n intriguing reevaluation of the function of poetry and fiction in nineteenth-century American culture. . . . Sentimental Collaborations prompts historians and literary critics to rethink their assessments about the sequence and pervasiveness of American individualism as well as attitudes toward death and mourning.”
--Journal of the Early Republic
"Mary Louise Kete's bold critical work, Sentimental Collaborations, offers a radically new historicist methodology. . . . A unique and well-written work, Sentimental Collaborations contributes most importantly to the study of nineteenth-century American poetry with its methodology. Additionally, Kete's insight into the poetry of these ordinary Vermontians, and into the aesthetic values of what might constitute a class of people whose ambition is ordinariness, is striking and innovative, and offers great excitement to those in the field. Sentimental Collaborations belongs on the reading list of anyone interested in new ideas about poetry and American culture, as well as anyone interested in dynamic approaches to literary study."
--Elizabeth Dill, Rocky Mountain Review
Product Description
During the 1992 Democratic Convention and again while delivering Harvard University’s commencement address two years later, Vice President Al Gore shared with his audience a story that showed the effect of sentiment in his life. In telling how an accident involving his son had provided him with a revelation concerning the compassion of others, Gore effectively reconstructed himself as a typical, middle-class American for whom sympathy can lead to salvation. This contemporary reiteration of mid-nineteenth-century American sentimental discourse proves to be a fruitful point of departure for Mary Louise Kete’s argument that sentimentality has been an important and recurring form of cultural narrative that has helped to shape middle-class American life.
Many scholars have written about the sentimental novel as a primarily female genre and have stressed its negative ideological aspects. Kete finds that in fact many men—from writers to politicians—participated in nineteenth-century sentimental culture. Importantly, she also recovers the utopian dimension of the phenomenon, arguing that literary sentimentality, specifically in the form of poetry, is the written trace of a broad cultural discourse that Kete calls “sentimental collaboration”—an exchange of sympathy in the form of gifts that establishes common cultural or intellectual ground. Kete reads the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney with an eye toward the deployment of sentimentality for the creation of Americanism, as well as for political and abolitionist ends. Finally, she locates the origins of sentimental collaboration in the activities of ordinary people who participated in mourning rituals—writing poetry, condolence letters, or epitaphs—to ease their personal grief.
Sentimental Collaborations significantly advances prevailing scholarship on Romanticism, antebellum culture, and the formation of the American middle class. It will be of interest to scholars of American studies, American literature, cultural studies, and women’s studies.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
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