Sentimental Materialism

by Merish, Lori; Pease, Donald E.

• ISBN13: 9780822325161
• ISBN10: 0822325160
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

"Ranging powerfully from the Scottish Enlightenment to the Cuban cigar, Lori Merish furnishes the culture of sentimentalism with a commodity logic and a political form. She finds, in fact, a whole new approach to women's writing, the society of slavery, the spiritual qualities of manufactured things, and the law of the market considered not as sentimental culture's antithesis but as its very foundation."--Eric Lott, author of "Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class "

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: The Forms of Cultured Feeling	1	(28)
Embodying Gender: Sentimental Materialism in the New Republic	29	(59)
Gender, Domesticity, and Consumption in the 1830s: Caroline Kirkland, Catharine Sedgwick, and the Feminization of American Consumerism	88	(47)
Sentimental Consumption: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Aesthetics of Middle-Class Ownership	135	(56)
Domesticating ``Blackness'': Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and the Decommodification of the Black Female Body	191	(38)
Fashioning a Free Self: Consumption, Politics, and Power in the Writings of Elizabeth Keckley and Frances Harper	229	(41)
Not ``Just a Cigar'': Commodity Culture and the Construction of Imperial Manhood	270	(45)
Conclusion	304	(11)
Notes	315	(50)
Works Cited	365	(18)
Index	383