Focusing on the genre of poetry, Kete argues that sentimentality functioned within the American Romantic period as a mode by which subjects fashioned a system of values which tended to define middle-class in the19th century.

Sentimentality (SM) has been a recurring form of cultural narrative that has helped to shape middle-class Amer life. Literary SM, in the form of poetry, is the written trace of a broad cultural discourse that Kete calls ¿sentimental collaboration¿ (SC) -- an exchange of sympathy in the form of gifts that estab. common cultural or intellectual ground. She reads the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, & Lydia Huntley Sigourney with an eye toward the deployment of SM for the creation of Americ¿m., as well as for political & abolitionist ends. The origins of SC are in the activities of people who participated in mourning rituals -- writing poetry, condolence letters, or epitaphs -- to ease their personal grief. Ill.

The Sentimental Touch' explores the strange, enduring power of sentimental language in the face of a rapidly changing culture.

This book explores male friendship in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through Mark Twain and the relationships he had with William Dean Howells, Joseph Twichell, and Henry H. Rogers.

"Tender Is the Night" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Sentimental Identities is a major examination of Fitzgerald's 1934 masterpiece as the clearest exemplar of Fitzgerald's sentimentalism, a mode that shaped his distinctive blend of romance and realism throughout his career.

Based entirely on archival research, Poets in the Public Sphere traces the emergence of the "New Woman" by examining poetry published by American women in newspapers and magazines between 1800 and 1900. Using sources like the Kentucky Reporter, the Cherokee Phoenix, the Cincinnati Israelite, and the Atlantic Monthly, Bennett is able to track how U.S. women from every race, class, caste, region, and religion exploited the freedom offered by the nation's periodical press, especially the poetry columns, to engage in heated debate with each other and with men over matters of mutual concern. Far from restricting their poems to the domestic and personal, these women addressed a significant array of political issues--abolition, Indian removals, economic and racial injustice, the Civil War, and, not least, their own changing status as civil subjects. Overflowing with a wealth of heretofore untapped information, their poems demonstrate conclusively that "ordinary" nineteenth-century women were far more influenced by the women's rights movement than historians have allowed. In showing how these women turned the sentimental and ideologically saturated conventions of the period's verse to their own ends, Bennett argues passionately and persuasively for poetry's power as cultural and political discourse. As much women's history as literary history, this book invites readers to rethink not only the role that nineteenth-century women played in their own emancipation but the role that poetry plays in cultural life.

At a time when a woman speaking before a mixed-gender audience risked acquiring the label “promiscuous,” thousands of women presented their views about social or moral issues through sentimental poetry, a blend of affect with intellect that allowed their participation in public debate. Bridging literary and rhetorical histories, traditional and semiotic interpretations, Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment explores an often overlooked, yet significant and persuasive pre–Civil War American discourse. Considering the logos, ethos, and pathos—aims, writing personae, and audience appeal—of poems by African American abolitionist Frances Watkins Harper, working-class prophet Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and feminist socialite Julia Ward Howe, Wendy Dasler Johnson demonstrates that sentimental poetry was an inportant component of antebellum social activism. She articulates the ethos of the poems of Harper, who presents herself as a properly domestic black woman, nevertheless stepping boldly into Northern pulpits to insist slavery be abolished; the poetry of Sigourney, whose speaker is a feisty, working-class, ambiguously gendered prophet; and the works of Howe, who juggles her fame as the reformist “Battle Hymn” lyricist and motherhood of five children with an erotic Continental sentimentalism. Antebellum American Women's Poetry makes a strong case for restoration of a compelling system of persuasion through poetry usually dismissed from studies of rhetoric. This remarkable book will change the way we think about women’s rhetoric in the nineteenth century, inviting readers to hear and respond to urgent, muffled appeals for justice in our own day.