Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Abstract

In Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Cindy Weinstein radically revises our understanding of nineteenth-century sentimental literature in the United States. She argues that these novels are far more complex than critics have suggested. Rather than confirming the power of the bourgeois family, Weinstein argues, sentimental fiction used the destruction of the biological family as an opportunity to reconfigure the family in terms of love rather than consanguinity. Their texts intervened in debates about slavery, domestic reform and other social issues of the time. Weinstein shows how canonical texts, such as Melville's Pierre and works by Stowe and Twain, can take on new meaning when read in the context of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. Through intensive close readings of a wide range of novels, this groundbreaking study demonstrates the aesthetic and political complexities in this important and influential genre.

The Outsider’s Edge: Geography, Gender, and Sexuality in the Local Color Movement

“…Marion Harland), and Susan B. Warner. Most feminist critics have disparaged the sentimental novels as fictional acquiescence to patriarchal norms, though Weinstein (2004) argues that they broke with convention in reconfiguring what constitutes a family by bringing in ties of affection that displace ties of blood. Sentimental and Local Color fiction overlaps in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, but most of the Sentimental authors were born in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, whereas most Local Color authors were born in the second or third quarters.…”

Sentimentalism’s Nation: Maria J. McIntosh and the Antebellum Contexts of “Southern” Fiction

“…As critic Cindy Weinstein has argued, this gesture is an "exportation of slavery to Scotland," enabling Warner to portray America as "the home of freedom." 14 Thus, while The Wide, Wide World does not address slavery directly, it is profoundly involved in dispersing an Americanized philosophy of paternalistic power, similar to that espoused in explicitly proslavery texts like McIntosh's.…”

The American Short Story Cycle

“…In so doing, these contemporary cycles and their modernist forerunners descend from earlier cycles, largely by and about women, which link otherwise loosely connected stories by their interest in family. Judith Fetterly and Marjorie Pryce (1992), Kate McCullough (1999), D. K. Meisenheimer (1997), and Cindy Weinstein (2004) argue that many women writers working in the form from around the turn of the last century, such as Jewett, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Sui Sin Far, and Zitkála-Šá, initiated a line of formal and thematic descent that has as its heirs the modernist and contemporary cycles linked by family. Far's cycle Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) illuminates the complexity of these earlier treatments of kinship.…”