Feminine Sentimental Fiction Renovated. Mrs Eliza Parsons' The Valley of Saint-Gothard

Caliban ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-50
Author(s):  
Philippe Séjourné
Keyword(s):  
Sentimental Fiction

Miscegenated Whiteness: Rebecca Harding Davis, the "Civil-izing" War, and Female Racism

2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Knadler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
White Women ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
White Female ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
The Public ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender

This essay examines Rebecca Harding Davis's resistance to the Civil War discourse in the Atlantic Monthly in order to complicate the relation between nineteenth-century racism and sentimental fiction. While much revisionary work has been done on nineteenth-century women'sfiction and how it reinforced racial ideologies, the misleading question often asked is whether white women did or did not participate in the public arena of race. Yet this initial framing of the question denies the alternative possibility: that white women might have engaged in their own gendered forms of racial activity, or in a "female racism" (to use Vron Ware's term), that did not correspond to or act in complicity with a racism that is by default seen as public and masculine. By imagining her heroine as a "woman from the border" inWaiting for the Verdict (1868), Davis works to oppose and overturn a particular regional and gender-based inscription of whiteness that was being disseminated amid the war crises as an emergent New England-based national identity. In contrast, Davis creates a particular feminine and liminal version of white racial power, or a "miscegenated whiteness." But this fantasy of an imagined national community based on the "white mulatto" finally undoes itself in the novel's moments of narrative crises about a free and open female sexuality, and Davis'snovel seeks to restore the white female body to its "purity."

Tales of Two Families, 1793–1800

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Legal Standing ◽  
Mothers Of Color ◽  
Key Characters

This chapter charts the experiences of mixed-race migrants competing with legitimate relatives in Britain. In particular, it examines a number of inheritance lawsuits between Jamaicans of color in Britain and their white relatives over a shared colonial estate. It contends that constrictions in the definition and legal standing of kinship at the turn to the nineteenth century suddenly made mixed-race Jamaicans improper members of extended, Atlantic families. Increasing discomfort with mixed-race family members is also demonstrated in sentimental fiction at the time. The chapter assesses a large number of novels and fictional tracts in the last decade of the eighteenth century that included migrants of color as key characters in their stories. The inclusion of such characters was employed to excoriate the illegitimacy, marginal position, and racial divergence of mixed-race people in Britain. Finally, the chapter traces the experiences of the mothers of color left in Jamaica and the ways they attempted to advocate for their children across the Atlantic.

Plagiarised Prophecy in the Romantic Works of al-Manfalūṭī, al-ᶜAqqād and al-Māzinī

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-113
Author(s):  
Maya I. Kesrouany
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Colonial Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Absolute

The chapter focuses on the free, and occasionally plagiarized adaptations of three major figures of early Egyptian romanticism - Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī, Abbās Maḥmūd al-‘Aqqād, Ibrāhīm al-Mazinī. It reads the free appropriation of French romantic and sentimental fiction as well as British romantic thought paradigmatically as making possible prophetic narration with a displaced origin. The origin is forgotten in a translation that refuses to name itself as such. It explores the birth of a romantic notion of literary prophecy in relation to a history of plagiarism in Arabic literature, challenging readings of the absolute modernity of the translators studied. It also situates translation as appropriation in relation to the changing function of literature in the early 20th-century, pointing to its new agency in producing moral didacticism. Reading their translations and their essays/articles together, the chapter locates a different form of romantic prophecy that is not secular but rather disruptive of the hegemonies of colonial time.

Laurence Sterne in the Romantic Anthology

2019 ◽  
pp. 93-125
Author(s):  
Jeanne M. Britton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Disturbance ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Shared Affect

This chapter describes the fictional forms by which Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey present confrontations between characters separated by differences of ethnicity, race, and species, particularly in episodes that were frequently republished in popular anthologies. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, readers encountered a version of Sterne’s sentimental fiction that is incompatible with a critical consensus about his novels. While Sterne has been understood to base subject-formation on the appropriation of another’s sentiments through the experience of sympathy, popular anthologized forms of his works, by contrast, emphasize emotional disturbance and preclude the return to a stable, narrating self. Anthologized versions of Sterne mobilize aspects of his original works—the structure of the frame tale, an interest in giving voice to figures of radical difference (including animals and former slaves), and the experience of shared affect and narrative—and specify Romantic-era fiction’s revision of sympathy.

Pamela and the Satirists

2019 ◽  
pp. 612-627
Author(s):  
Jennie Batchelor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Tidal Wave ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
The Face ◽  
Critical Conversation ◽  
Opening Up

Reading the Pamela controversy through Eliza Haywood’s still frequently overlooked Anti-Pamela (1741), this chapter demonstrates the failure and undesirability of Samuel Richardson’s efforts to supplant the satirical mode with the sentimental in his first novel. Much of the critical conversation about satire and sentiment in the mid-to-late eighteenth century has, with notable exceptions, positioned these as antagonistic modes. Moreover, the (exaggerated) demise of satire in the face of the tidal wave of sentiment has been often heralded as opening up new possibilities for the articulation of female subjectivity. Anti-Pamela, this chapter argues, undermines such claims. In a satirical novel that would mark a turning point in her career as a sceptical writer of sentimental fiction, Haywood revealed that ‘true’ satire, as opposed to the ‘scurrilous’ satire of which she accused her fellow interlocutor Henry Fielding, was the best antidote to the cultural fictions of gender promoted by the novel.

Developments in Sentimental Fiction

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sill
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Laurence Sterne ◽  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Oliver Goldsmith ◽  
Sarah Fielding ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Moral Sensibility ◽  
The Third ◽  
Henry Mackenzie ◽  
The Reformation

The sentimental strain in English fiction, which represents men of feeling and women of sensibility engaging in acts of sympathy and benevolence, became prominent in the 1760s through the novels of Charlotte Lennox, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, and others, building primarily on the work of Samuel Richardson and Henry and Sarah Fielding. The reformation of male manners, the feminization of taste and consumption, the grounding of ethics in human nature rather than rationalism or faith, and the emergence of a theory of moral sensibility all contributed to the popular reception of sentimental fiction. Frances Burney’s first two novels, Evelina and Cecilia, successfully combined sentiment with the comedy of Fielding and the moral sententiousness of Richardson, but in the third, Camilla, Burney felt the pressure of an increasing taste for realism, which eventually lessened the predominance, though it did not entirely eliminate, the sentimental form.

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