People have always noticed that representations affect them, and have variously explained, classified, evaluated, justified, regulated, and enjoyed this phenomenon. Whereas Plato banned poets from his republic in order to restrict influences upon the citizenry, Aristotle formulated his theory of catharsis to legitimate the effects of art upon persons. Noting that drama consistently produces in audiences certain effects - fear, pity, admiration, awe, superiority, affinity, belief, skepticism, compassion, and relief - Aristotle identified these responses as official aims of art, formalizing what audiences feel as the standard moral effects achieved by art.

Since the late seventeenth century, when mass print culture provided greater numbers of persons with the regular affective experience of literature, the novel became another focal point in the ongoing debate and discourse about the effects of representation. Even more than drama and poetry, the novel seemed to demand the reader’s sentiments, through the staged direct address of epistolarity, or through the differently but equally contrived direct address of apostrophe to reader. Thus, when Harriet Beecher Stowe famously enjoins readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to “feel right,” she is writing in an ancient tradition to which modern sentimentalism has contributed its affective techniques, upholding longstanding assumptions about reader response. No less than Aristotle assuming that tragedy arouses terror and pity in audiences, Stowe relies on the sentimental novel to produce sympathy in readers, an abolitionist sympathy for the plight of slaves in mid-nineteenth-century America.