Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History argues that African American, Native American, Latinx, and Anglo-American women writers use genre to negotiate hemispheric encounters amidst the gendered, racialized, and cultural violence of the nineteenth-century Americas. Although US literary sentimentalism is often framed in national and transatlantic terms, this book argues that the mode was deeply transamerican. Given the popularity of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, the appearance of its central motifs—tearful embraces, fainting heroines, angelic children—in transamerican US texts is unsurprising. What is remarkable is how texts not generally considered sentimental deploy seemingly insignificant affective episodes to navigate gendered and racialized experiences of conflict throughout the Caribbean and the US–Mexico borderlands. Throughout Transamerican Sentimentalism, marginal characters, momentary gestures, offhand remarks, and narrative commentaries serve to disrupt plots, potentially connecting characters across cultural, racial, national, and linguistic borders. Transamerican sentimentalism cannot unseat the violence of the nineteenth-century Americas, but it does dislocate familiar figures such as the coquette and the mulatta to produce other potential outcomes—including new paradigms for understanding the coquette, a locally successful informal diplomacy, and motivations for violent slave revolt. Transamerican sentimentalism is a fleeting, mercurial, and marginal mode. Frequently overwhelmed by the violence pervading the hemisphere, it could be categorized as a failed venture. Yet it is also persistent; as it recurs throughout the nineteenth century, it opens into alternative African American, Native American, and Latinx avenues for navigating and comprehending US–Americas relations.
Lucy Steele, the Mistress of Sense and Sensibility, in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility