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  3. Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Cited by 7
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      14 March 2019
      28 March 2019
      ISBN:
      9781108698931
      9781108481335
      9781108722216
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108698931
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.64kg, 306 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (229 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.445kg, 320 Pages
      • Series:
      Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (182)
      Subjects:
      Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory
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    • Selected: Digital
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    Series:
    Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (182)
    Subjects:
    Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Literary Theory
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    Book description

    In accessible and impassioned discussions of literature and philosophy, this book reveals a surprising approach to the intractable problem of human contact. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson rethought the nature of human contact, turning away from transcendentalist approaches and towards sympathetic ones. Their second and third works portray social masks as insufficient, not deceptive, and thus human contact requires not violent striking through the mask but benevolent skepticism towards persons. They imagine that people feel real in a real world with real others when they care for others for the other's sake and when they make caring relationships the cornerstone of their own being. Grounded in philosophies of sympathy - including Adam Smith and J. G. Herder - and relational psychology - Winnicott and Benjamin - Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature shows that antebellum literature rejects individualist definitions of the human and locates the antidote to human disconnection in sympathy.

    Reviews

    ‘Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact joins a wider and important conversation about the ways in which literature imagines togetherness and the functions of sentiments, emotions, and affects within these emplotments.’

    Thomas Constantinesco Source: The Emily Dickinson International Society

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