Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power 1750-1850

The Rule of Sympathy is a social and historical critique of sympathy in British discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Although initially associated with feminized or effeminate forms of sentimental discourse (the romance, the novel, the gothic), sympathy came to function as a key technology of gender and race in new evangelical social movements, such as abolitionism and missionizing. Amit Rai argues that sympathy was a paradoxical mode of power. The differences of r...