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More Than a Feeling : = Materializing Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	More Than a Feeling :/
Reminder of title:	Materializing Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.
Author:	Downes, Kathleen.
Description:	1 online resource (163 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 86-01, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International86-01A.
Subject:	American literature. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9798383195512

More Than a Feeling : = Materializing Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.
Downes, Kathleen.

More Than a Feeling :Materializing Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. - 1 online resource (163 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 86-01, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Mississippi, 2024.

Includes bibliographical references

"More than a Feeling: Materializing Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature" breaks from a long tradition of criticism that only considers the nineteenth-century belief that sympathy was a benevolent, voluntary, imaginative act of feeling that maintains moral rectitude through the identification of suffering with others. In this context, sympathy is primarily defined as identificatory sympathy. "More than a Feeling" expands the definition of sympathy in the nineteenth century as also something that could be atmospherically communicated, transmitting good or bad feeling, and thus affecting and infecting those around them. This other form of sympathy, which for this project I term "effluvial sympathy," is experienced involuntarily, exists as an atmospheric phenomenon, and is described in terms of the magnetic forces of attraction and repulsion, or moving in electrical currents. It can be benevolent, but it can also be malevolent, thus multiplying its potential expressions.In the first two chapters I trace effluvial sympathy in the popular medical and domestic manuals: Gunn's New Domestic Physician's and The American Woman's Home. In my analysis of Gunn's New Domestic Physician, I explore a medical anxiety about the potential for one to govern their mind against the affective stimuli generated through acts of identificatory sympathy. By examining these acts, I notice that, according to the prevailing logic of the age, sympathy becomes a potentially degenerative force for the future populations of the United States. In The American Woman's Home, I study the Beecher sisters' anxiety about the efficacy of public institutions, such as orphanages, hospitals, and prisons, because they lack the moral domestic atmosphere engendered by the sympathetic influence of a moral housekeeper. Domestic atmosphere is key for the Beecher sisters toward the proper cultivation of health and morality. I then turn to two reform novels, George Lippard's The Quaker City; or the Monks of Monk Hall and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, which both employ effluvial sympathy to illuminate how the systemic forces of exploitative capitalism and slavery render it impossible for the individual to attend to the cultivation necessary to properly attend to effluvial sympathy.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2024

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9798383195512Subjects--Topical Terms:

685398
American literature.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Affective stateIndex Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

More Than a Feeling : = Materializing Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.
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520 $a "More than a Feeling: Materializing Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature" breaks from a long tradition of criticism that only considers the nineteenth-century belief that sympathy was a benevolent, voluntary, imaginative act of feeling that maintains moral rectitude through the identification of suffering with others. In this context, sympathy is primarily defined as identificatory sympathy. "More than a Feeling" expands the definition of sympathy in the nineteenth century as also something that could be atmospherically communicated, transmitting good or bad feeling, and thus affecting and infecting those around them. This other form of sympathy, which for this project I term "effluvial sympathy," is experienced involuntarily, exists as an atmospheric phenomenon, and is described in terms of the magnetic forces of attraction and repulsion, or moving in electrical currents. It can be benevolent, but it can also be malevolent, thus multiplying its potential expressions.In the first two chapters I trace effluvial sympathy in the popular medical and domestic manuals: Gunn's New Domestic Physician's and The American Woman's Home. In my analysis of Gunn's New Domestic Physician, I explore a medical anxiety about the potential for one to govern their mind against the affective stimuli generated through acts of identificatory sympathy. By examining these acts, I notice that, according to the prevailing logic of the age, sympathy becomes a potentially degenerative force for the future populations of the United States. In The American Woman's Home, I study the Beecher sisters' anxiety about the efficacy of public institutions, such as orphanages, hospitals, and prisons, because they lack the moral domestic atmosphere engendered by the sympathetic influence of a moral housekeeper. Domestic atmosphere is key for the Beecher sisters toward the proper cultivation of health and morality. I then turn to two reform novels, George Lippard's The Quaker City; or the Monks of Monk Hall and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, which both employ effluvial sympathy to illuminate how the systemic forces of exploitative capitalism and slavery render it impossible for the individual to attend to the cultivation necessary to properly attend to effluvial sympathy.
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653 $a Reform novels
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