1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910458606603321

Autore

Stern Julia A

Titolo

The plight of feeling [[electronic resource] ] : sympathy and dissent in the early American novel / / Julia A. Stern

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 1997

ISBN

1-281-43067-6

0-226-77309-4

9786611430672

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (324 p.)

Disciplina

813/.309

Soggetti

American fiction - 18th century - History and criticism

Politics and literature - United States - History - 18th century

Psychological fiction, American - History and criticism

Dissenters in literature

Emotions in literature

Sympathy 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 (p. 239-291) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- ONE. The Plight of Feeling -- TWO. Working through the Frame: The Dream of Transparency in Charlotte Temple -- THREE. Beyond "A Play about Words": Tyrannies of Voice in The Coquette -- FOUR. A Lady Who Sheds No Tears: Liberty, Contagion, and the Demise of Fraternity in Ormond -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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.