hen the fictional Professor William Stearns, self-proclaimed genius and proud author of History of the Dark Ages, informs Fanny Fern's writer/protagonist Ruth Hall that" Now and then, there's a gleam of something like reason in your writings, but for the most part they are unmitigated trash-false in sentiment-unrhetorical in expression," 1 he enters, in 1855, a debate over the nature and quality of women's sentimental writing whose terms remain little modified today. For many of the critics who have approached American sentimentalism over the past fifty years (and many earlier critics as well), sentimental writing is inherently false in sentiment and/or unskilled in expression. It is, quite simply, not literary. From midtwentieth-century New Criticism to the current cultural critique, literary distinctions such as that between individualized, well-crafted, and genuinely moving texts and those that are merely formulaic either do not exist or do not apply to sentimental literature. 2 In the interests of expanding the critical vocabulary and refining the critical methodologies we bring to American literature in this era of canon expansion, I wish to advocate here a more traditionally literary approach to the influential body of mid-nineteenth-century writing we have come to designate sentimental. Only by understanding how this body of work constructs the literary can we read individual texts as agents operating within a literary field rather than merely as cultural artifacts. Sentimental writing is as varied in quality as other literary modes, and if we approach it solely as a cultural discourse, as the current critique tends to do, we address it only partially. Literary in intention and literary in reception, sentimental fiction and poetry can