Williamson, Jennifer A., 1978-
Twentieth-century sentimentalism : narrative appropriation in American literature /
Jennifer A. Williamson.
- New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, (c)2014.
- 1 online resource.
- American Literatures Initiative .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Standing together, side by side: Grace Lumpkin's To make my bread -- Not plough-shares but people: Josephine Johnson's Now in November -- His home is not the land: caretaking, domesticity, and gender in John Steinbeck's The grapes of wrath -- Forged in a crucible of suffering: Margaret Walker's Jubilee -- Octavia Butler's Kindred: my face too was wet with tears -- Toni Morrison's Beloved: feeling how it must have felt to her mother.
This book argues that sentimentalism, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode, is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of "feeling right" in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, it explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals.