12 Early-19th-Century Literature

The scholarship addressing this period reveals two marked preoccupations: sentimentalism and the Civil War. New studies further examine the politics of sentiment, delineating cultural practices inflected by economics, race, gender, and class. Recent work on the Civil War looks beyond military history to the concurrent activities of women writers and to the genres and discourses that permeated popular culture before, during, and after the war. As a point of convergence for sentimental poetics and antebellum slavery debates Uncle Tom's Cabin remains the most hotly discussed novel of the era, its contemporary relevance signaled by the publication of an MLA volume of essays on teaching that text. Work on Stowe approaches in volume new scholarship on Poe, an indication of her centrality to studies of abolitionism, race theory, and women's cultural roles. Discussions of nationalism and American identity also figure prominently, as critics influenced by Benedict Anderson and post-colonial theory have emphasized the "contestation" of national identity along lines of race and ethnicity. This new work occasionally challenges the "separate spheres" approach to U.S. literary studies, crossing gender boundaries to draw larger interpretive connections. But we are just beginning to consolidate studies of diversity into a fully integrated understanding of American literature—as the organization of this chapter unavoidably reflects.

Cultural studies remains the pervasive interpretive paradigm, generating abundant explorations of ideological subtexts and sociopolitical contexts. Surveying a year's worth of criticism any reader will notice a fair amount of repetition. The same may be said, no doubt, about every dominant critical movement. But the proliferation of similar studies and the reiteration of familiar shibboleths imply a need for rhetorical and conceptual replenishment. In much of the best recent work race, class, and gender remain key issues, but the authors have avoided stock phrases and shopworn arguments to deliver sophisticated critiques in fresh, accessible language.

i Period Studies

Several books and essays deal with multiple authors and take wider views of the antebellum era than titles to be cited subsequently. Long neglected or disparaged but lately rehabilitated by Jane Tompkins, Philip Fisher, and others, the sentimental mode forms the object of a handful of ambitious new studies. Lori Merish's strenuous Sentimental Materialism links sentimentalism to the construction of middle-class identity and the commodification of social desire. Material consumption "facilitates and domesticates women's political agency" according to Merish's densely theoretical opening chapter. Subsequent chapters address exemplary women's texts such as Caroline Kirkland's A New Home—Who'll Follow?, which revises the savage/civilized dialectic of male frontier narratives to contrast frontier crudeness with the "civilizing" influence of "feminine taste and domestic material refinement." Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Home celebrates "the power of sentimental ownership" as well as the "affectional and psychological significance" of objects, while Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin problematically extends sentimental ownership to slaves, differentiating between a "male realm of insensitivity and hardness" and a "female, domestic realm" of solicitude. Merish then examines narratives by African American women (Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth) endeavoring to "decommodify" themselves as exploited, sexualized objects. She evokes Thoreau, Crèvecoeur, and Child in her conclusion to suggest the emergence of "a national romance of property embedded within the structure of sentiment," implicating capitalism in the formation of a "white racial fantasy of economic, political, and national entitlement."

Less polemical, Mary Louise Kete's Sentimental Collaborations also approaches sentimentalism as an articulation of class status but emphasizes communal and cultural ties forged by loss and sustained by memorial poems and artifacts. Kete's opening chapters scrutinize an antebellum album of local manuscript verses collected by one Harriet Gould; the poems (presented in an appendix) here exemplify the language and poetics of "sentimental collaboration." Locating similar ideas in sentimental fiction Kete argues that the multiple plots of Uncle Tom's Cabin "turn on the circulation of child relics," while in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar "the dead remember the living as the living remember the dead within an ongoing economy of affection and sentiment." Before moving on to Twain's quirky view of sentimentalism Kete devotes central chapters...