This chapter surveys the interrelated histories of literature, religion, and politics in the nineteenth-century United States. In the wake of official church disestablishment, a wave of religious fervor combined with a rising tide of immigrants to form a nation in which literature became a venue for conversion, condemnation, and cultural affirmation. From early national historical romances that sought to confirm the new nation as God’s (Protestant) chosen land to Transcendentalist writings that celebrated the sacredness of the individual American soul, nineteenth-century literature tied American identity to religious pluralism and personal devotion. Sentimental novels penned by women writers and narratives of escape written by the formerly enslaved fitted religious tropes of conversion and resurrection to visions of social reform and political regeneration, while Mormons, Millerites, Shakers, Spiritualists, and other religious innovators developed new models of spiritual identity and literary language suited to an expansive and imperial nation. Over the course of the century, literature served as a venue for theological debate, a vehicle for conversion, a passionate plea for abused humanity, and an imaginative space for envisioning social reform. In each of these modes, authors of literature intervened not only in religious discourses but in the vital political life of the nation.

This essay traces the study of the vexed topic of sentimentalism in long nineteenth-century American critical discourse. Over the past decades, scholars have drawn upon different disciplines and critical theories to reframe the expansive and subtle complexities of sentimentalism’s influence as mode and ideology; these investigations, under the capacious term “feeling,” sometimes dovetail with, and other times are disaggregated from, inquiries into sympathy, affect studies, the sensorium, and the history of emotions. Although the turn to affect has been seen as a way out of political overdetermination, concerns about liberatory potential and structural collusions were prefigured and informed by debates about sentimentality’s ethical bind. This essay turns to negative terms, glossing the use of “unfeeling” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then appearances of “unfeeling” and “unsympathetic” in illustrative scholarship over the last three decades for their operations and implications. The chapter then teases out the cultural politics of unfeeling from a queer, feminist of color perspective: What if one reconsiders unfeeling from the vantage point of those marginalized and not simply as hegemonic imposition? The discussion closes with Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša, reassessing the Indigenous activist’s wish, in her own words, to become “unfeeling stone.”

This chapter covers the period from the late 1780s through the late 1840s, and introduces two closely intertwined cultural movements: Russian Sentimentalism (or the age of sensibility) and Russian Romanticism (also known as the Golden Age of Russian poetry). Departing from debates on the paradoxes of Russian Romanticism, the chapter considers the genealogy and basic features of the movement by assessing the oeuvre and literary impact of the ‘father of Russian Romanticism’, the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii. To paraphrase a dictum wrongly attributed to Fedor Dostoevskii, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the literary spectre of Russian Romanticism came out of the angelic robes of this lofty, melancholy, and chaste poet, who playfully called himself the ‘poetic guardian of the English and German devils and witches’.

Ideas of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity were in flux throughout the eighteenth century. This chapter places Goldsmith’s comedies She Stoops to Conquer and The Good Natur’d Man at the heart of contemporary gender debates. The theatre was a significant site for the negotiation of gender where women’s sensitivity, modesty, and gentility were touted as positive social forces capable of reforming men and improving manners by conditioning women to please others. Goldsmith’s plays can be seen as part of the ‘feminization debate’ – British discourse which trumpeted the progressive effects of women on modern society while seeking to condemn perceived transgressions of an increasingly binary gender order.

Chapter 3 focuses on Anna E. Dickinson, a little-read but in her time central abolitionist and antiracist activist, lecturer, and novelist. A riveting speaker who was a major voice for Radical Republicans, Dickinson toured the country addressing mixed-gender audiences on abolition, women’s suffrage, the right for unions to organize, and antiracism. Dickinson’s first novel, What Answer? (1868), follows an interracial couple, William Surrey and Francesca Ercildoune, from their first meeting in 1861 to their deaths in 1863 at the hands of a New York Draft Riot mob. It ends with a climactic scene in which Francesca’s brother, Robert Ercildoune, accompanied by a white friend. attempts to vote in a local 1865 election and is barred by racist poll-goers. The novel takes on issues raised by the debates around the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment that were raging while Dickinson was writing What Answer? Both the Amendment and the novel take as their central theme Black citizenship, without which the losses of the Civil War, represented by the many amputee characters in the book, would have been in vain.

Chapter 1 traces the antebellum faith in the non-finality of death and its antithesis in the irreparable change wrought by amputation. In sentimental theology, the dead are never wholly gone – they live on to inspire and save, awaiting reunion with those they leave behind. The dead child embodies the reality of unpredictability and at the same time operates within a narrative that soothes. The author contrasts antebellum postmortem photography and images of amputees and amputated limbs. Postmortem photography of children reinforces the sense that the family has not really been ruptured, that death isn’t really the end. Photographs of amputee Civil War soldiers do quite the opposite. Rather than operating as postmortem photography does, as a mediator between the living child, its dead body, and the family left behind, the portrait of the amputee is insistently in the present, even as the lost limb is consigned to an unrecuperable past. While nineteenth-century pictures of dead children often encouraged the fiction that the photograph’s subject was an ongoing member of the family, amputation photography – both medical and vernacular – insists on the permanence of bodily change.

This chapter examines the ways in which Grand Tour narratives developed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and contributed to the conception of Europe in that period. It includes Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy &c (1705), Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) and argues that in the later eighteenth century the description of Europe via a part (classical Italy) gives way to an emphasis on the particular. Recent critical attention to slowness, microspection and proximate ethnography in travel writing studies is applied to Grand Tour sentimentalism and satire in order to propose the value of reading such texts as examples of vertical travel. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women’s contributions to Grand Tour writing and discourse rearticulated some of the motifs of stillness and intimacy popularised by earlier writers such as Sterne but introduce new frameworks for thinking about Europe which include its possibilities as a site for shared, familial experience.

This chapter advocates for an emotion-aware approach to climate change ethics education. The authors begin by reviewing traditional strategies, both noting their strengths and limitations and highlighting how these traditional approaches often neglect the role of emotion in climate change ethics education. From here the authors discuss five philosophical frameworks that motivate and give substance to a more emotion-aware approach. They then detail four central pedagogical elements that are characteristic of this approach, explaining how these elements give shape to a distinctive and compelling pedagogical approach to climate change ethics education. They conclude by discussing both the benefits and challenges of adopting a more emotion-aware strategy.

This chapter argues that from late Stalinism to the Khrushchev Thaw (1941–1964), Eastern poets and orientalist translators inflected multinational and international translation with a distinctively Persianate ethics of love and hospitality. The chapter develops an account of a mid-century internationalist sentimentality grounded in translation, which prefigures subsequent attempts in feminist theory to reconfigure the patriarchal idea of translation as possessive love into a more receptive model of translation. The opening section challenges the established Soviet and Russian studies narrative in which multinational literature is said to have been invented in Russian translation, showing Eastern poets’ active involvement in programming their own reception. A series of case studies follow. One section considers the collaborations of Uzbek and Russian poets on bilingual poems of hospitality for the Jewish refugees flooding Tashkent during the Second World War. Another shows how the embedded sonnets of Romeo and Juliet were brought into the ghazal mode in Tajik translation. Another shows how the Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet’s theater adaptation of the classical romance Farhad and Shirin sparked Thaw literature debates in Russian and Turkic translations. Poets discussed include Ghafur Ghulam, Anna Akhmatova, Konstantin Simonov, and Zhala Isfahani.

This chapter explores how Nietzsche’s shift towards a naturalistic methodology in the late 1870s offers him an axiological and epistemic apparatus that radically alters his philosophical articulation of pessimism, and consequently affects his attitude towards it. The chapter argues that contemporary Nietzsche scholarship has largely overlooked the importance of Human, All Too Human as a crucial stage of Nietzsche’s development in approaching the question of the value of existence. By exploring the influence of Paul Rée, Eugen Dühring, and the neo-Kantians, it introduces Nietzsche’s own ‘frame of reference’ argument against pessimism as a metaphysical view, and distinguishes between different possible interpretations of it.

The literary context of Tolstoy matters because his works not only emerged in concrete literary and historical circumstances, but expressed in their own ways shared concerns, ideas, fears, and aspirations, characteristic of the respective periods and, in particular, of the generation affected by the humiliating outcome of the Crimean War, the collapse of the decades-long isolationist conservative “scenario of power” of Nicholas I, and a series of forthcoming profound social and political reforms that changed the emotional and ideological outlook of Russian culture. The chapter primarily focuses on Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace within its actual literary and ideological contexts, including fierce contemporary debates on the most pressing issues of the 1860s, unleashed in powerful, tendentious “thick” journals. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s final sentence of the novel, the epistemological value of seeing Tolstoy in conversation with his contemporaries (Turgenev, Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Leskov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Grigoriev, Dmitry Pisarev, Surikov, Musorgsky, etc.) lies both in the renunciation of vision of his “unreal immobility in space” (generally taken for granted) and concurrently in the recognition of his dependence on other writers and literary contexts “of which we are unaware.” Gulliver is determined by his bonds.

This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

Storming the breaches of a fortress was the most perilous of military undertakings. After setting out the operational nature and challenges of British sieges in the Peninsular War, this chapter explores the cultural and emotional history of the British storming of besieged fortress-towns in the Napoleonic era, especially in Spain, revealing a cult and spectacle of storm that took hold in this epoch, borne of a reinvigoration of martial honour codes, ideals of heroic and patriotic self-sacrifice, and romantic and sublime sensibilities. British soldiers’ writings on their motivation for storming reveal a complex and interactive mix of remunerative incentives of promotion and plunder on the one hand, and bravery, esteem, honour and patriotism, on the other, with soldiers driven by both individual and collective values and loyalties. Further, this chapter analyses how soldiers managed fear and emotion in the impending eye of the storm, and the importance of sentimental culture in how they responded to the trauma and devastating loss of comrades in the aftermath.

In this essay, I chart a new origin story to counter popular understandings of the triumphalist, celebratory, northern- and abolitionist-centered origins of American animal welfare by providing underexplored historical context for the proslavery as well as antislavery origins of humane sentiment. I argue that humane carceral logics, or the rationale that surveillance, prosecution, and incarceration to protect animals through the legal system justified as well as pacified the means, ultimately produced coercive and discriminatory tools that naturalized white reformers’ heightened scrutiny of communities of color. I explore how white supremacy contributed to the formation of humane carceral logics by providing a historical study of carceral trends and the ways in which humane sentiment produced racial knowledge.

An overview of Steinbeck’s critical reputation that reasseses negative claims that Steinbeck is a middlebrow writer whose work is marked by unself-conscious nostalgia and sentimentalism. Turning to examples from The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Valley, the introduction argues that Steinbeck is a complex, varied, and experimental writer whose work is marked by metafiction and provocative contradiction that make it capable of unpacking and critically reexamining the very “faults” of which it is accused. Against claims that Steinbeck’s value lies in the past, I outline the many ways that his work is of urgent relevance today.

After an introductory discussion of Flaubert’s development as a writer and his direct experience (with Maxime Du Camp) of the February Revolution, this chapter focuses on his great novel, Sentimental Education. This novel is both the story of an unconsummated love affair and an account of the experience and imaginative life of the generation of young people who came to maturity around 1840 and whose lives were either broken or redirected by the revolution of 1848. Our analysis emphasizes the care taken by Flaubert to establish a counterpoint between the collapse of political ideals in 1848 and the collapse of the dreams of the individual characters. The novel is considered as a work of history and compared to the work of historians like Georges Duveau and Maurice Agulhon. A number of specific scenes and vignettes are discussed in an attempt to show how Flaubert brings the past to life. We conclude with a discussion of Bouvard and Pecuchet, which includes a chapter on the revolution of 1848 as it affected a village in Normandy. Though written in an overtly comic vein, this chapter reinforces the picture offered by Sentimental Education of history as ruled by elemental forces that overwhelm the plans of individuals.

After a general discussion of the experience of proscription, exile, and “internal exile,” we follow each of our nine writers into exile, retirement, or a new life. We then compare their assessments of particular events and individuals: notably the prison massacres during the June Days and the portraits of Auguste Blanqui and Adolphe Thiers. We turn to three themes: 1) the religiosity that pervaded the language of the ‘forty-eighters; 2) the repeated recourse to theatrical language and imagery to describe both the course of events and the tendency of revolutionaries to mimic the words, deeds and gestures of the first French revolutionaries; 3)the cult of “the people” elaborated as a source of democratic legitimacy by some of our writers and criticized by others. In conclusion, I maintain that in their effort to explain the failure of the democratic republic in 1848–1852, our writers raise questions that continue to concern us. Their central concern was the problem of democracy. When, and how, would the people be able to govern themselves? How was it that in the space of two generations democratic revolutions had twice culminated in Napoleonic dictatorship? There are worse questions to ask if we are to begin to understand the failures of democratic politics in our own time.

Chapter 9 focuses on the two chapters that go missing near the end of the novel, where Uncle Toby is finally able to acknowledge his love for Widow Wadman but only, it seems, with a Bible open to the book of Joshua, the passage about the siege of Jericho. Why this passage? And why does Sterne purposefully misnumber and rearrange these chapters of his novel? The mock fortifications that Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim build together, those replicas of military sieges happening in Europe, work in the novel as metaphors for the ways that all books – whether philosophy, scripture, or fiction – can both distance us from difficult intimate relationships and make room to repair them.