An Archeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema by James Chandler (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 637 cause it is beautifully written, a very readable book as well. Its engagement with critical questions in the history of knowledge place it in the company of seminal works like Chandler’s England in 1819 and Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump, both of which speak with authority about larger social and theoretical questions in the histories of knowledge by grounding their critiques in rigorous historical work. My one wish in read­ ing Klancher’s account is that I would have loved a third section, on “Questions of the Sciences,” in which the establishment of the BAAS and of groups like the Geological Society were more fully explored as the sci­ ences bifurcated along new specialist and populist lines. Also, it would have been interesting to include museums: their social spaces and administrated knowledge, their shifts in relations between collectors, virtuosi, curators, ethnologists, and publics, especially at the turn of the nineteenth century when the British Museum and Bullock’s Museum were exactly the kinds of centers of action and attraction that Klancher so persuasively restores to the center ofBritish cultural life. Because Klancher is particularly interested in the dispersal ofthe republic ofletters, and the divergent fates ofRoman­ tic conversation and of print cultures, the role of institutions devoted to material culture—objects, specimens, artifacts, instruments—remains unex­ plored. Ifwe were to look at museums at this time we could bring into fo­ cus different “indisciplines,” to use Simon Schaffer’s term, with often ex­ otic genealogies from distant places. But Klancher’s transformative account is sure to help energize exactly those kinds of new interdisciplinary investi­ gations in Romantic period studies. The strength of Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences is the rich array of unfa­ miliar institutions, agents, and polities that it uncovers, and the rigor with which it generates new frameworks in which we can see institutions as key sites for the sciences and arts, literature among them. Whether one works on museums or history of science or Romantic literature, we all benefit from Klancher’s generative reappraisal of the arts and sciences in this piv­ otal age. Adriana Craciun University of California, Riverside James Chandler. An Archeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Litera­ ture and Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xxii+430. $45. While we already have some fine pieces of scholarship on how Shaftesburian “sympathy” and “the sentimental mode” arose in the literature and philosophy of eighteenth-century England and flowed into writing of the SiR, 53 (Winter 2014) 638 BOOK REVIEWS Romantic era, James Chandler’s highly eloquent and absorbing new study surpasses nearly all of them in precision of description and in historical and aesthetic scope. On the one hand, it provides undergraduates and advanced scholars with unusually clear connections and distinctions between “sensi­ bility,” “the sentimental,” and “sympathy” (as well as their watered-down derivative, “sentimentality”). It defines sympathy quite sharply as an atti­ tude, stance, or aesthetic scheme (this last of which is “the sentimental mode”), best dramatized by the face-to-face encounter, in which one men­ tality “adopts” or identifies with “another” and thereby “modifies passion into [widely humane] sentiment” by way of a “virtual circulation” of out­ ward feeling across other minds and eventually many minds (xvii). Chan­ dler thereby establishes this process as one “deep principle of intelligibility in” what has become the modern “aesthetic and ethical structuring of ex­ perience” (330), finding it most thoroughly articulated before the 1780s by Laurence Sterne, albeit in a way that is shown to build powerfully on Adam Smith, Samuel Richardson, and Latitudinarian religiosity. On the other hand, this book argues better than any other that the “scheme of fea­ tures and practices” essential to this mode (13) has ultimately had a long and widely-disseminated life. It has extended itself and its principal ele­ ments, Chandler reveals, in Western cinema from the 1910s to the 1990s, indeed at the very center of“classic Hollywood” filmmaking—especially in the pictures of Frank Capra in the 1920-40S, analyzed here across his whole career—and also in the fiction of Charles Dickens, a long-acknowledged influence on Capra, as well as in...