How could novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin change the hearts and minds of thousands of mid-nineteenth-century readers, yet make so many modern readers cringe at their over-the-top, tear-filled scenes? Sentimental Readers explains why sentimental rhetoric was so compelling to readers of that earlier era, why its popularity waned in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and why today it is generally characterized as overly emotional and artificial. But author Faye Halpern also does more: she demonstrates that this now despised rhetoric remains relevant to contemporary writing teachers and literary scholars.
Writers in Europe: 1850 to the Present. Edited by Ferdâ Asya. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
The chapters on the works of Nathaniel Parker Willis, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Gertrude Atherton, John Cournos, Edith Wharton, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Edwin Rolfe, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, Allen Ginsberg, Harriet Welty Rochefort, and Suzy Gershman, explore the impartial critical outlook that American writers acquired in different parts of Europe, from 1850 to the present, and used as a lens to view Europe and America. Focusing on some less familiar writers, they reveal intriguing aspects of the lives and works of American writers than those of the customarily anthologized expatriates. Offering a broad range of American experiences in Europe in an extensive span of time, the book widens the history of the transatlantic cultural and literary dialogue between America and Europe.