The Sentimental Touch investigates emotion in American literature during a period in which American culture became more and more impersonal. Between 1850 and 1940, with the rise of managerial capitalism in the United States, the most powerful businesses were no longer family-owned, but became sprawling organizations controlled by complex bureaucracies. Rapid changes in the economy transformed U.S. culture: capitalism emerged as a massive ruling order whose hierarchical structures outlasted any human, and Americans became increasingly atomized and alienated. Sentimental literature—work written ... More

The Sentimental Touch investigates emotion in American literature during a period in which American culture became more and more impersonal. Between 1850 and 1940, with the rise of managerial capitalism in the United States, the most powerful businesses were no longer family-owned, but became sprawling organizations controlled by complex bureaucracies. Rapid changes in the economy transformed U.S. culture: capitalism emerged as a massive ruling order whose hierarchical structures outlasted any human, and Americans became increasingly atomized and alienated. Sentimental literature—work written specifically to convey and inspire deep feeling—does not seem to fit with a swiftly bureaucratizing society. Yet sentimental language persisted in American literature, even as a culture of managed systems threatened to obscure the power of individual affect. The Sentimental Touch explores the strange, enduring power of sentimental language by focusing on one of the hallmark expressions of the sentimental novel: the human touch whose meaning surpasses all language. When characters make their deepest feelings visible through silent bodily contact, characters and readers alike imagine they are experiencing unmediated emotion. Analyzing novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and Nathanael West, this book demonstrates that sentimental tropes change but remain powerful, even in works by authors who self-consciously write against the sentimental tradition. Sentimental language has an afterlife, enduring in American literature long after authors and critics declared it dead, insisting that human feeling can resist a mechanizing culture, and embodying, paradoxically, the way that literary conventions themselves become mechanical and systematic.