1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910458456003321

Autore

Barnes Elizabeth <1959->

Titolo

Love's whipping boy [[electronic resource] ] : violence & sentimentality in the American imagination / / Elizabeth Barnes

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chapel Hill [N.C.], : University of North Carolina Press, 2011

ISBN

1-4696-0334-9

0-8078-7796-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (222 p.)

Disciplina

813/.309353

Soggetti

American fiction - 19th century - History and criticism

Violence in literature

Empathy in literature

Sentimentalism in literature

National characteristics, American, in literature

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction -- Wieland, familicide, and the suffering father -- Melville's fraternal melancholies -- Fathers of violence: Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and the radical reproduction of sensibility -- The death of boyhood and the making of Little women.

Sommario/riassunto

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, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, among others, Barnes shows how violence