Afterlife of Sympathy

Regular price €33.99
A01=Faye Halpern
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
American literature
Author_Faye Halpern
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DS
Category=DSB
Category=DSK
Category=DSRC
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
literary history
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
reading
realism
sentimentalism
softlaunch

Product details

  • ISBN 9781625347855
  • Weight: 399g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 30 Jun 2024
  • Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

Literary realism rose to prominence in postbellum America with what the realists heralded as artful and accurate depictions of the world. Realism is thought to have replaced sentimentality—an earlier mode of writing the realists disparaged, which has often been seen as antithetical to realism. Literary scholar Faye Halpern challenges this apparent binary by uncovering how and why William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Charles Chesnutt incorporated sentimental elements into their most famous works.

With its distinctively narratological approach, The Afterlife of Sympathy offers a more rhetorical way to understand sentimentality and assess the ethical complexity of sympathy. Halpern demonstrates how sentimentality enables authors to form intimate relationships between their characters and readers to supplement the critical distance that realist writers otherwise celebrate and that has remained a key value in literary studies today. In reassessing American literary realism, Halpern seeks not only to understand why these writers adopted sentimental techniques but to provide insight into contemporary arguments in literary studies about critical distance and sympathetic identification.

Faye Halpern is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary and coeditor of Ohio State University’s Theory and Practice of Narrative book series.