Directed Reading, Directed Writing: Sentimental Exchanges in the Antebellum United States Público

Abstract

Abstract

"Directed Reading, Directed Writing" contends that sentimental narrative consistently
returns to the problem of its reception, to the power and danger of the emotive reading it
seeks to produce. We see this concern both in sentimental novels and in the world in
which they circulated: characters form deep, emotional attachments to their beloved
books; letter-writing fans profess their devotion to an author while scolding her for
failing to produce sequels; and anxious commentators worry about the power that novels
exert over their audience. I attend to these moments in order to unravel the networks that
unite author and reader through and around the sentimental text. I argue that these
networks - dynamic, emotional relays among writers, texts, and readers - allow authors
and audiences alike to imagine how reading sentimental narrative affects both readers and
the world in which they live.

To pursue this claim, "Directed Reading, Directed Writing" turns to a wide variety of
sources, including sentimental novels, nineteenth-century fan letters, antebellum debates
about reading novels, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of affect. In the
antebellum United States, sentimental fiction operated as a crucial site in which the
nation confronted the basic, but radical premise that reading can entangle us - that it can
produce pleasure, passion, and change. By demonstrating how sentimental fiction
insisted that writers and readers reconsider the very function of reading, my project seeks
to push the critical discussion of sentimentality past its political triumphs and
disappointments. Instead, I contend that the experience of reading sentimental fiction
precedes and even licenses its political ramifications, and also points to a broader
conception of the cultural work that sentimentality accomplished in antebellum America.
Today, we continue to argue about why and how reading should matter, and that
argument has become increasingly fraught as literary reading has declined. "Directed
Reading, Directed Writing" suggests that we can look to the nineteenth century for an
illustration of how the passions of literary reading might radiate out into the public sphere
- and a way to finally name the risks and rewards of such a thrilling pursuit.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction
Feeling and Reading Right
1

Chapter 1
Sentimental Reading in the Antebellum United States
24

Chapter 2
Directed Reading and Directed Feeling in the Sentimental Novel:
The Case of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World
89

Chapter 3
Readers Write Back:
Susan Warner's Readers and the Dynamics of Sentimental Reading
142

Chapter 4
Writing Race, Reading Sentiment:
William G. Allen's The American Prejudice Against Color
and Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends
190

Conclusion
How to Read and Why:
A Twenty-First-Century Perspective
260

Works Cited
276

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	English
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, American
Palabra Clave	nineteenth-century American literature emotions in literature fan mail sentimentality books and reading
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Elliott, Michael A, Emory University
Committee Members	Moon, Michael, Emory University Reiss, Benjamin, Emory University Foster, Frances Smith, Emory University

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