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The collection features essays that examine how authors of the 20th
and 21st centuries continue the use of sentimental forms and tropes
of 19th century literature. Current literary and cultural critical
consensus seems to maintain that Americans engaged in a
turn-of-the-century refutation of the sentimental mode; however,
the analysis in these essays of 20th and 21st century narratives
reveals ongoing use of sentimental expression that draws upon its
ability to instruct and influence readers through their emotions.
While these later narratives employ aspects of the sentimental
mode, many of them also engage in a critique of the failures of the
sentimental, deconstructing 19th century perspectives on race,
class and gender and the ways they are promoted by sentimental
ideals.
In Heaven's Interpreters, Ashley Reed reveals how
nineteenth-century American women writers transformed the public
sphere by using the imaginative power of fiction to craft new
models of religious identity and agency. Women writers of the
antebellum period, Reed contends, embraced theological concepts to
gain access to the literary sphere, challenging the notion that
theological discourse was exclusively oppressive and served to deny
women their own voice. Attending to modes of being and believing in
works by Augusta Jane Evans, Harriet Jacobs, Catharine Maria
Sedgwick, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner, Reed illuminates how these writers
infused the secular space of fiction with religious ideas and
debates, imagining new possibilities for women's individual agency
and collective action. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia
Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph
Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open
Access volumes from Cornell Open
cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
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