In accessible and impassioned discussions of literature and philosophy, this book reveals a surprising approach to the intractable problem of human contact. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson rethought the nature of human contact, turning away from transcendentalist approaches and towards sympathetic ones. Their second and third works portray social masks as insufficient, not deceptive, and thus human contact requires not violent striking through the mask but benevolent skepticism towards persons. They imagine that people feel real in a real world with real others when they care for others for the other's sake and when they make caring relationships the cornerstone of their own being. Grounded in philosophies of sympathy - including Adam Smith and J. G. Herder - and relational psychology - Winnicott and Benjamin - Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature shows that antebellum literature rejects individualist definitions of the human and locates the antidote to human disconnection in sympathy.
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'Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact joins a wider and important conversation about the ways in which literature imagines togetherness and the functions of sentiments, emotions, and affects within these emplotments.' Thomas Constantinesco, The Emily Dickinson International Society
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Analyzes the evolution of antebellum literary explorations of sympathy and human contact in the 1850s and 1860s.
Introduction;
1. Transcendental approaches to human contact;
2. 'Some
true relation': the evolution of Hawthorne's understanding of human contact;
3. 'The sentiment of justice must revolt in every heart': Frederick Douglass,
white empathy, and the humanity of black autobiography;
4. 'All the
vivacities of life lie in differences': abrasive sympathy after Uncle Tom's
Cabin;
5. 'Sweet skepticism of the heart: Dickinson's sympathetic
phenomenology.
Marianne Noble is the author of The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (2000), which won a Choice Outstanding Book Award. She also co-edited Emily Dickinson and Philosophy (Cambridge, 2013) and has published essays in Studies in American Fiction, The Yale Journal of Criticism, New England Quarterly, and The Emily Dickinson Journal. She has served on the Boards of American Literature, the Emily Dickinson International Society, Legacy, and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. In 2016, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Korea. She is an Associate Professor of Literature at American University, Washington DC and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.
