Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America

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A study of how sentiment has been an important and recurring form of cultural narrative that has helped to shape middle-class American life. Many scholars have written about the sentimental novel as a primarily female genre and stressed its negative ideological aspects. Mary Louise Kete finds that in fact many men - from writers to politicians - participated in 19th-century sentimental culture. Importantly, she also recovers the utopian dimension of the phenomenon, arguing that literary sentimentality, specifically in the form of poetry, is the written trace of a broad cultural discourse that Kete calls sentimental collaboration - an exchange of sympathy in the form of gifts that establishes common cultural or intellectual ground. Kete reads the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney with an eye toward the deployment of sentimentality for the creation of Americanism, as well as for political and abolitionist ends. Finally, she locates the origins of sentiment in the activities of ordinary people who participated in mourning rituals -writing poetry, condolence letters, or epitaphs - to ease their personal grief.