Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion / Edition 2

by Julie Ellison

Overview

How did the public expression of feeling become central to political culture in England and the United States? In this ambitious revisionist account of a much expanded "Age of Sensibility," Julie Ellison traces the evolution of the politics of emotion on both sides of the Atlantic from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.

Early popular dramas of this time, Ellison shows, linked male stoicism with sentimentality through portrayals of stoic figures whose civic sacrifices bring other men to tears. Later works develop a different model of sensibility, drawing their objects of sympathy from other races and classes-Native Americans, African slaves, servants. Only by examining these texts in light of the complex masculine tradition of stoic sentimentality, Ellison argues, can one interpret women's roles in the culture of sensibility.

In her conclusion, Ellison offers "a short history of liberal guilt," exploring the enduring link between male stoicism and male sensibility in political and cultural life from the late seventeenth century to today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226205960
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/15/1999
Edition description:	1
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Someday Bridges May Have Feelings Too
Chapter 1: Conspiracy, Sensibility, and the Stoic
Chapter 2: Cato's Tears
Chapter 3: The Deathbed of the Just
Chapter 4: Female Authorship, Public Fancy
Chapter 5: Vagrant Races
Chapter 6: Walkers, Stalkers, Captives, Slaves
Conclusion: Liberal Guilt and Libertarian Revival
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Ellison (English, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor) traces the evolution of the relationships among politics, sensibility, and masculinity on both sides of the Atlantic from the English Exclusion Crisis of 1681 to the end of the Tripolitan War in 1815, and, in a substantial conclusion, to the 20th century's culture of libertarian think tanks and "liberal guilt." She argues that the spectacle of heroic male grief is crucial to the modern democratic imagination. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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