Abstract

Chapter 1 attends closely to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) as an example of the premanagerial American sentimental novel. For Stowe, sentimentalism is a utopian force-powerful enough to destroy slavery. Stowe's text trains the reader to respond to sentimental bodies: when we see a body in unjust pain, we are not only moved emotionally, but we should be moved to act in the world as well. The most highly sentimental scenes in the novel feature moments of tactile power. The gentle hand engaged in a sentimental touch is the antidote to the brutalizing hand of the overseer; even in its early form, the sentimental touch critiques the hand that is misused to serve economic interests. Stowe's sentimentalism is rooted in the moral sense, the shared feelings of right and wrong that, according to the moral sense philosophers, hold society together.

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