Rescate editorial. Nunca es tarde cuando la dicha es buena (1858) de Tomás Gutiérrez

This editorial rescue presents and contextualizes, within Nineteenth-Century Argentine literature, the sentimental brief novel or “novelita”, entitled Nunca es tarde cuando la dicha es buena, originally published in Las Violetas. Ensayos Literarios in 1858, by the unknown author Tomás Gutiérrez. This novel, mentioned by Hebe Molina and Myron Lichtblau in their studies of Argentine literary history of the 19th century, has remained unknown since the last decades of the 19th century, until now, when it is rescued from a single copy found in the Argentine Academy of Letters. Its re-edition is framed within a study of the sentimental literature of the 1850s and 1880s and contributes to the understanding of this literature, apparently only passatist and innocent, as a key discourse in the construction of subjectivities, roles of gender, sexual behaviors and forms of intimacy in the decades after Rosismo and before the consolidation of the Nation State in 1880. The moral character, the intertextuality with Christian resonance and its condition, at the same time, of first literary commodity (Velázquez, 2017) converge in the formation of this hybridized cultural device full of rich social implications. Also, the question of love marriage vs. forced marriage appears, both here and in other sentimental novels of the time, shows some of the topics that, around the sentimental sociability of the time, had created generational, racial and social class controversies.

Moor, Mulata, Mulatta

The second chapter centers a figure familiar within US sentimental literature, the tragic mulatta, placing her among hemispheric counterparts: the enslaved Moor and the Cuban mulata. Mary Peabody Mann’s only novel, Juanita (1887), offers an Uncle Tom’s Cabin-style antislavery narrative set in Cuba, importing a US racial hierarchy to the island. Mann’s novel overwrites figures such as the Cuban mulata and the mulato antislavery leader, replacing them with Eva-like children and a tragic US mulatta. Yet Cuban author Cirilo Villaverde’s novel Cecilia Valdés (1882) demonstrates how Juanita’s racial hierarchy diverges from that developing in late-nineteenth-century Cuba, which offered a different model of racial relationships. Erasing the multiracial nature of Cuba’s antislavery and anticolonial movements, Juanita prefigures US influence in Cuba following the Spanish–American War.

Coquetry and the Transamerican Foundations of US Literary Sentimentalism

Chapter 1 recontextualizes early US sentimental literature through the coquette, a figure who connects Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), and Leonora Sansay’s novel of the Haitian Revolution, Secret History (1808). The chapter argues that the historical connections between Sansay’s and Foster’s heroines demonstrate how novels such as The Coquette obscure the transamerican connections underlying their “found[ing] on fact.” Secret History instead uses its Saint-Dominguan setting to rewrite paradigmatic US understandings of the coquette, rescuing the figure from both gothic horrors and the condemnations suffered by Brown’s and Foster’s heroines. Pairing Foster’s, Brown’s, and Sansay’s novels illustrates how early US sentimentalism was shaped by the Americas’—not just early America’s—literary, economic, political, and military flows.

Susanna Rowson’s Barbary Captivity Narrative, or the Struggle for the Freedom of American Women in Algiers

This research explores the feminist dimensions of Rowson's play, Slaves in Algiers or, a struggle for freedom (1794), from historicist and dialogical perspectives. More particularly, it looks at the play within the context of the politics of the early American republic to uncover how Rowson deploys the captivity of American sailors in Algiers (1785-1796) as a pretext to deconstrust the established gender power relations without hurting the sensibilities of her audience in its reference to the issue of black slavery. The research also unveils the many intertextual relationships that the play holds with the prevalent captivity culture of the day, sentimental literature, and more specifically with Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

Sentimental Avatars: Gender Identification and Vehicles of Selfhood in Popular Media From Nineteenth-Century Novels to Modern Video Games

This article examines how the embodied experience of contemporary avatar use overlaps with 19th-century American sentimental literature and cultural assumptions about gender and readerly identification in that period. Drawing on recent quantitative and qualitative research on avatar use and ongoing scholarship on nineteenth-century literature, we offer theoretical insights about the resonance between historical and contemporary understandings of media consumption as it intersects with cultural notions of sex and gender differences. Theories of sentimentalism help us to reconsider how gender is conceptualized in quantitative studies of avatars. Our cross-disciplinary study of embodiment and visceral experience thus argues for expanding modes of inquiry within quantitative games scholarship to more fully capture the interplay between gender identity and individual factors in avatar experiences. We conclude with three strategies for quantitative games scholars to consider as a means to enrich our understanding of the complexities of gender in modern game contexts.

Tragic Sensibilities

This chapter considers the parallel development of bourgeois tragedy, genre serieux (the serious genre), and the era’s early sentimental literature. It reads Sarah Fielding’s pathbreaking sentimental novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), and Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751) in light of the siblings’ close connection to the first generation of bourgeois tragedians in order to claim that sentimental fiction refigures tragedy’s aesthetic frames, with both adopting the tableau in order to invest simple, pathetic scenes of ordinary suffering with dignity. The chapter then considers how these formal elements navigate between realism, sentimentality, and ironic detachment by looking briefly at scenes from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and Sophia Lee’s adaptation of Diderot’s Le Pere de famille (1758) as A Chapter of Accidents (1782). Finally, it considers this cultural and affective work in light of recent theories of “public intimacy.”

The Presence of the Dead among U.S. Protestants, 1800–1848

Historians have long known that antebellum American Protestants were fascinated by death, but they have overlooked Protestant relationships with the dead. Long before the advent of séance Spiritualism in 1848, many mourners began to believe—contrary to mainstream Protestant theology—that the souls of the dead turned into angels, that the dead could return to earth as guardian angels, and that in graveyards one could experience communion with the spirits of the departed. The version of Protestantism these mourners developed was therefore, to use Robert Orsi's term, a religion of “presence,” a religion in which suprahuman beings—in addition to God—played an important role. Based on diaries and popular sentimental literature written mostly by women, this article brings to light an unexplored facet of antebellum Protestant lived religion: that the dead were “present with us tho’ invisible,” as one young woman wrote about her deceased sister.

Good Niggerhood

This chapter considers the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ace reporter Ray Sprigle’s four weeks traveling through the Jim Crow South “passing for black” in 1948. In the subsequent 21-part series, “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days,” Sprigle writes how he is desperate to experience and document the most extreme aspects of Southern racism or “Dixie terror;” however, Sprigle only managed to “yessir” his way throughout the South becoming what he calls a “good nigger.” After Sprigle failed to experience the Dixie terrifying racism he needed to validate his experiment, the chapter argues that “good niggerhood,” a performance of cautious and respectable, black masculinity, undermined the integrity and ultimate goals of his project. The chapter argues that Sprigle attempted to save his failing racial expedition by parroting the language of iconic sentimental texts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The chapter then uses James Baldwin’s trenchant critique of sentimental literature, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” to expose a cultural overinvestment in this kind of racial experiment.