An important early phase in the recovery of American women's writing focused on the rich vein of sentimental fiction written in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg laid the groundwork for this recovery and revaluation in “The Female World of Love and Ritual” (1975); a decade later literary historians Jane Tompkins and Cathy N. Davidson published influential studies and new editions of sentimental fiction by American women. Soon questions arose about each of the terms defining the field: How American was it? Did men write it? Was it limited to fiction? What were the distinguishing characteristics and lineages of “sentiment”? Scholars also examined its political premises, putting less emphasis on its potential for imaginative empowerment and more on its coerciveness. Whereas in The Feminization of American Culture (1977), Ann Douglas had identified the rise of sentimental writing in the nineteenth century with an intellectual slackness that afflicted Protestant clergymen as well as women, another body of criticism well represented by Amy Kaplan's essay “Manifest Domesticity” (1998) pursued an ideological critique that identified different problems in the tradition. Kaplan shifted the concept of “domestic” from its principal scholarly use as an allusion to the private sphere to focus instead on its public significance in the realms of economy and nation building. Reframed in this way, the fiction that Tompkins and Davidson had celebrated for the ways it liberated middle-class white women appeared in a harsher light as part of the cultural apparatus of American empire.