The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel

by Julia A. Stern

Overview

American 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226773117
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/24/1997
Edition description:	1
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile:	1660L (what's this?)

About the Author

Julia A. Stern is Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence and professor of English at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel and Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Epic, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1: The Plight of Feeling
2: Working through the Frame: The Dream of Transparency in Charlotte Temple
3: Beyond "A Play about Words": Tyrannies of Voice in The Coquette
4: A Lady Who Sheds No Tears: Liberty, Contagion, and the Demise of Fraternity in Ormond
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

In this study of heightened emotions in American novels of 1789-99, Stern (English, Northwestern U.) proposes that the impassioned excess of the works indicates a collective mourning of the violence of the Revolution and reflects the authors' hope that the power of genuine sympathy could revivify a broadly inclusive vision of democracy. Stern offers detailed analyses of Susanna Rowson's , Hannah Webster Foster's , and Charles Brockden Brown's . Paper edition (unseen), $18.95. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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