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humanities 381 Many of the essays here are written from a queer studies perspective, the most noteworthy being John Saillant's on the same-sex propensities of early republican abolitionist rhetoric. The elasticity of the term `sentiment' therefore reflects and contributes to the unsettling of rigid sexual categories found in queer theory, as same-sex desire and affective simultaneity mirror each other in and as representation itself. Another frequent conceptual move in Sentimental Men is the deconstructivèassertion and its negation' conceit of so much contemporary criticism. This habit is particularly on display in Martin Berger's essay on Thomas Eakins's late portraits, which argues without supplying much by way of evidence that Eakins's renowned realism actually depended on the sentimentalism he would disown. The collection's final essay, on archnaturalist Frank Norris, finds sentiment at the core of his anti-sentimental naturalist project. This isn't to suggest that any part of this book is trite, only that some of its theoretical underpinnings have become, with use, a bit worn. Sentimentalism's infusion within so many precincts of American cultural life becomes a bit question-begging: that is, what isn't sentimental? If the sentimental seems to be everywhere B and on the account of this book and its 1994 sister collection, The Culture of Sentiment, it is B then we need to have a more complicated anatomy of what sentimentalism finally is. Does the eighteenth-century epistolary sentiment of Charles Brockden Brown indeed form a continuum with the failed businessmen of postbellum boom/bust economic life? To be sure, sentimentalism has presented different cultural meanings in different historical periods, and has furthermore been proven in books like Sentimental Men and its predecessors to be a far more complex cultural discourse than the modernist consensus would have us believe (although the `old school' dismissal of sentimentality was itself dismissed some time ago). But if sentiment is both canonical and popular, straight and queer, white and black and/or aboriginal, rational and emotive, entrepreneurial and dependent, hegemonic and subversive, exemplary and marginal, authentic and parodic, local and national, journalistic and literary, then the term's increasingly expansive ubiquity may come to hobble rather than enable our critical encounter with it. (BRYCE TRAISTER) David A. Wilson. United Irishmen, United States, Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic Cornell University Press 1998. xii, 224. US $29.95 United Irishmen, United States is about the interplay between Irish nationalism and Irish immigration to the newly independent United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is an engagingly told 382 letters in canada 1999 story about the Irish nationalists who came to America after the failure of their cause in Ireland. The size and importance of this body of ideological émigrés is a subject of some debate. Wilson argues that those who opposed them in America, conservative high Federalists, were right to fear that their number and impact was significant. His argument is that the United Irishmen played a crucial role in `democratizing' American politics by advancing the Jeffersonian Republican cause and pushing the downfall of the Federalists. The focus throughout much of the book, however, is on the most prominent and vocal leaders, so one does not get a full sense of the extensive organization or wide dissemination of sentiment which Wilson says the United Irishmen achieved in America. The book opens with a brisk history of the United Irishmen's doomed attempts at political reform in Ireland in the 1790s, the impact of the example of revolutionary America upon them, the recognition that America was to be their place of refuge, and the beginnings of the desire to realize in the United States what they failed to accomplish in Ireland. It then looks at how these ideological émigrés were portrayed by their enemies as aliens intent upon jacobinizing the new American republic. In the 1790s and in the years leading to the War of 1812 the United Irishmen were important in defining and galvanizing anti-British feelings. The Federalists reacted by attacking them as dangerous radicals and as the scum of Europe. With this combination of political and ethnic prejudices the Irish became early victims of...

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