Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
The Afterlife of Sympathy : Reading American Literary Realism in the Wake of "Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hardback Book

The Afterlife of Sympathy : Reading American Literary Realism in the Wake of "Uncle Tom's Cabin Hardback

Hardback

Pre-Order

Description

Literary realism rose to prominence in postbellum America with what the realists heralded as artful and accurate depictions of the world.

Realism is thought to have replaced sentimentality—an earlier mode of writing the realists disparaged, which has often been seen as antithetical to realism.

Literary scholar Faye Halpern challenges this apparent binary by uncovering how and why William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Charles Chesnutt incorporated sentimental elements into their most famous works. With its distinctively narratological approach, The Afterlife of Sympathy offers a more rhetorical way to understand sentimentality and assess the ethical complexity of sympathy.

Halpern demonstrates how sentimentality enables authors to form intimate relationships between their characters and readers to supplement the critical distance that realist writers otherwise celebrate and that has remained a key value in literary studies today.

In reassessing American literary realism, Halpern seeks not only to understand why these writers adopted sentimental techniques but to provide insight into contemporary arguments in literary studies about critical distance and sympathetic identification.

Information

Other Formats

£85.00

Pre-Order
Pre-Order
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information