The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American NovelAmerican novels written in the wake of the Revolution overflow with self-conscious theatricality and impassioned excess. In The Plight of Feeling, Julia A. Stern shows that these sentimental, melodramatic, and gothic works can be read as an emotional history of the early republic, reflecting the hate, anger, fear, and grief that tormented the Federalist era. Stern argues that these novels gave voice to a collective mourning over the violence of the Revolution and the foreclosure of liberty for the nation's noncitizens—women, the poor, Native and African Americans. Properly placed in the context of late eighteenth-century thought, the republican novel emerges as essentially political, offering its audience gothic and feminized counternarratives to read against the dominant male-authored accounts of national legitimation. Drawing upon insights from cultural history and gender studies as well as psychoanalytic, narrative, and genre theory, Stern convincingly exposes the foundation of the republic as an unquiet crypt housing those invisible Americans who contributed to its construction. |
Contents
1 | |
Sympathy and Dessent in the Early American Novel TWO Working through the Frame The Dream of Transparency in Charlotte Temple | 31 |
Sympathy and Dessent in the Early American Novel THREE Beyond A Play about Words Tyrannies of Voice in The Coquette | 71 |
Sympathy and Dessent in the Early American Novel FOUR A Lady Who Sheds No Tears Liberty Contagion and the Demise of Fraternity in Ormond | 153 |
Sympathy and Dessent in the Early American Novel Notes | 239 |
293 | |
Other editions - View all
The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel Julia A. Stern Limited preview - 1997 |
The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel Julia A. Stern No preview available - 1997 |
Common terms and phrases
African American Anglo-American audience Baxter becomes blackface Boyer Charles Brockden Brown Charlotte Temple Charlotte's chorus Clarissa compassion Constantia constitutes Coquette Craig cultural death discourse doppelgänger dramatic dynamic early American novel early national eighteenth eighteenth-century Eliza Wharton emotional epistolary fact fancy fantasy Federalist fellow feeling female feminized fetishism fiction fictive figure Fliegelman forger Foster's framed tale fraternity French functions gender gothic grief heroine heroine's homosocial identity imagination impulses Julia language letter libertine liberty literary Literature Looby Lucy Lucy's Major Sanford male Martinette maternal melancholia melodramatic Monrose Montraville moral mother mourning narrative narrator narrator's Ormond patriarchal Philadelphia Plight of Feeling political post-Revolutionary Power of Sympathy reader reading relations representation republic republican Revolution Revolutionary Richman romantic Rousseau Rowson's scene seduction sentimental sexual social Sophia story suggests Susanna Rowson tableau Temple's theatrical tion ultimately University Press vision voice Wieland William Hill Brown woman women writes yellow fever York