Love's Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination

Working to reconcile the Christian dictum to “love one’s neighbor as oneself” with evidence of U.S. sociopolitical aggression, including slavery, corporal punishment of children, and Indian removal, Elizabeth Barnes focuses her attention on aggressors — rather than the weak or abused — to suggest ways of understanding paradoxical relationships between empathy, violence, and religion that took hold so strongly in nineteenth-century American culture.

Looking at works by Herman Melville, Freder...