This chapter considers queer relations of identification and desire in nineteenth-century sentimental American literature, especially as they relate to the (re)production of the increasingly privatized, middle class, white, family. It considers how texts queer the substitutions of others for mothers (and fathers, and brothers, and sisters) in order to maintain and queer the normative family. The chapter moves from paradigmatic examples to ones that appear to revel in queer visions of identificatory erotics. It then draws upon queer of color critique to examine how white supremacy defines the human and/as normative gender and sexuality, such that Black and other people of color are placed as queer others in order to preserve a fantasy of white gender and sexual purity. This racialized version of queer as non-normative complicates any ideal of a solely celebratory or even neutral taxonomizing of identifications, desires, and their accompanying kinship structures.

In the settler-enslaving context of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, where multiple discourse communities (politics, science, Christianity, and abolitionism) worked in tandem to signify Blackness as a distinct biological entity, Black writers crafted an alternative symbolic order that understood racialized Blackness as a socially constructed embodied experience. This chapter argues that, for thinkers like Phillis Wheatley Peters, Adam Carman, Maria Stewart, Rev. J. W. Loguen, and Harriet Jacobs, the Black body is a site of overdetermined experiences that – when studied – reveal the machinations of anti-Black sociopolitical processes. By focalizing three areas of critical interrogation – moral inversion, natural rights, and sentimentality – I show how these thinkers interrogated the West’s foundational mythologies of nation and selfhood.

This chapter charts the ultimate triumph of the emotional regime of scientific modernity in the form of antisepsis, Joseph Lister’s application of germ theory to surgical practice. It begins by exploring the ways in which antisepsis eliminated the patient as an emotional agent in surgery. The 1860s saw profound concern within surgery about the devastating impact of sepsis on post-operative mortality. Many of the explanations provided for this phenomenon rested on long-standing ideas about the role of the patient’s constitution and emotional state in regulating their post-operative health. However, by focusing purely on the condition of the wound, and the need to keep it free of ‘germs’, Lister’s antisepsis effectively overwrote these explanations, rendering patient subjectivity largely meaningless. At the same time, however, if emotions no longer possessed any ontological significance in surgery, the second part of this chapter demonstrates that they nonetheless played a powerful rhetorical function, as this ‘new world of surgery’ was configured in highly sentimentalised terms. This sentimentality not only served to counter widespread popular anxieties about surgery’s moral character, but also constructed Lister, the ultimate scientific surgeon and the emotional template for surgical modernity, as a quasi-divine saviour.

The aim of this chapter is to use necropolitics and sentimentality as theoretical entry points to broaden understandings of death as a form of power against subjugated (e.g. Black, migrant, refugee) lives. This theorizing is approached through the dilemma of showing or not showing dead-body images in the classroom as an ethical, political and pedagogical intervention. This intervention entails numerous challenges such as: the risk of traumatizing students; the danger of superficializing colonial histories, structural racism, and contemporary geopolitical complicities producing such deaths; and, the challenge of finding productive ways to respond pedagogically to the emotionally difficult spaces of learning that are created, without sentimentalizing death. The analysis makes an attempt to reclaim the entangled meanings of necropolitics and sentimentality in pedagogical discourse and practice by re-visioning the sentimental in ways that interrogate the normalization of death-making in the current political climate.

With the expansion of the postal system from the mid seventeenth century, there was a growing interest in epistolary writing. Like real letter writers, authors of early epistolary novels focus on the material conditions of communication by letter. The most common plot devices have to do with what can go wrong in the postal system. Letter novels typically present themselves as a collection of real letters, a packet that has been lost and found, or entrusted to a friend who arranged for their publication. Epistolary fiction appealed to readers newly fascinated with how intimate thoughts could be expressed in writing, and what pleasure, as well as utility, could be drawn from reading the private thoughts of others. The letter novel was also congenial to some of the core aspirations of Enlightenment thought: a commitment to dialogical thinking, an openness to cultural difference, the notion of a ‘Republic of letters’ formed by conversational exchange between educated people who were often geographically separated. While epistolary fiction declined in popularity in the nineteenth century, letter novels have continued to resurface as experiments in narrative form, well suited to exploring contrasting subjectivities and the endless opportunities for failed and interrupted communication in the modern world.

Emotion in close reading is a coil, spring or spiral (labelled Stage V) that comes towards the end of our labyrinthine experience of lines of verse – or so I. A. Richards suggests in the ‘Arcadia’ diagram of Principles of Literary Criticism. For the early practical critics on whom Richards experimented, this coil of feeling was an unfortunate vortex from which little affective intelligence emerged: modernist close reading revealed only inhibitions, sentimentality, stock responses. This chapter explores how practical criticism navigates an unsettling new matrix for understanding the experience of feeling in reading and of ‘tone’ as a critical category. It examines the crisis of affect within literary criticism’s early disciplinary history by focusing on Richards’s understanding of ‘pseudo-statement’ and by tracing his contemporary dialogues (Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot) and later interlocutors, such as Sianne Ngai. The chapter re-considers the figure of the critic as cultural confidence man and challenges the flattening of new-critical ‘tone’ in recent affect theory.

This chapter gives an overview of the current debates regarding the way human rights has been defined and historicized. It argues that understanding these debates is crucial for an understanding of the ways in which human lights matter to literary study. Referencing the works of Johannes Morsink, Paul Gordon Lauren, Lynn Hunt, and Samuel Moyn, the author moves the through the varied points of origin and genealogies of human rights as we understand them today. The chapter shows that this present concept is by no means unambiguous, and argues that literature and its analysis provides us with one of the best ways to investigate the historical and political tensions that exist at its very foundations.

This chapter seeks to recover forgotten ideological and structural causes behind humanitarianism, ones which have been eclipsed by its association which the fraught aid industry, the white saviour syndrome, and the general ineffectiveness of sentimentality when it comes to humanitarian action. Distinguishing between the worlds of “missionary” and “emergency” humanitarian expression (with histories dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, originating separately in discourses of reform and abolition, and that of crises such as natural disaster and war), the authors show how these two strands present widely different narratives and concepts of suffering, innocence, temporality, witnessing, evidence, and so on.