Cultural criticism conclusion referec introduction

Gothic novel

Main article: Gothic fiction
The Gothic novel's story occurs in a distant time and place, often Medieval or Renaissance Europe (especially Italy and Spain), and involved the fantastic exploits of a virtuous heroine imperiled by dark, tyrannical forces beyond her control. The first Gothic novel is Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), but its most famous and popular practitioner was Ann Radcliffe, whose early Gothic novels in the 1790s maintain the fashion. ^[13]
Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, following Edmund Burke, held that the sublime and the beautiful were juxtaposed. The sublime was awful (awe-inspiring) and terrifying while the beautiful was calm and reassuring. The characters and landscapes of the Gothic rest almost entirely within the sublime, with the heroine serving as the great exception. The “beautiful” heroine's susceptibility to supernatural elements, integral to these novels, both celebrates and problematizes what came to be seen as hyper-sensibility.

Relation to the Gothic novel

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Gothic and sentimental novels are considered a form of popular fiction, reaching their height of popularity in the late 18th century. They reflected a popular shift from Neoclassical ideas of order and reason to emotion and imagination. ^[14] Popular stylistic elements, such as the "discovery" of the original manuscript by the author (as in Walpole's The Castle of Otranto ) or creating fragmented works by combining disjointed tales (seen in Sterne's A Sentimental Journey ) were meant to suggest to the reader that there was no act of artistic creation to distort reality between the reader and the work, or that the emotional intensity and sincerity remained intact
2.MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY SENTIMENTALISM
The period in American history that is most commonly associated with sentimentalism is the mid-nineteenth century. The sentimentalism of this period has been defined in various ways. Some have characterized it as conservative, a rationalization of the status quo, while others have characterized it as radical and a means of effecting social change. But most sources agree that it is associated with femininity and domesticity, its primary characteristic being an emphasis on feeling and the affective bonds among human beings.
What differentiates mid-nineteenth-century sentimentalism from that of other periods, however, is that it is generally characterized as wholly female. Although women writers did not have a monopoly on feeling during this period, and their books were read by men as well as women, sentimentalism fit nicely into contemporary definitions of domestic womanhood. Also largely middle-class and incorporating religious rhetoric into their writing, the sentimental writers of this period were criticized by later, more secular critics seeking a "virile" masculine ethos. Twentieth-century critics wrote contemptuously about mid-nineteenth-century women writers, often without even reading their works. Fred Lewis Pattee characterized the period as "The Feminine Fifties" in his 1940 book by that title and called even so cynical and down-to-earth a writer as the satirical Fanny Fern the "most tearful and convulsingly 'female' moralizer" of the period (p. 110). Herbert Ross Brown's study of the antebellum period, The Sentimental Novel in America (1940), labeled sentimentality a "disease" and castigated women writers of the period for not dealing with what for him were the "real" issues: the [masculine] "national drama" of Manifest Destiny and the "rise of the common man" (pp. 358–359, 369–370). Following in this tradition, Ann Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture (1977) maintained that the intellectual "toughness" of the male-dominated Calvinism of the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) had been undermined by the sentimentalism of feminized ministers and middle-class women writers. Dismissing the writers' attempts to effect social change, she held them responsible for the country's "introduction to consumerism" and mass culture (see, for example, pp. 5–7, 10–13). Other critics similarly criticized the sentimental novelists as essentially conservative writers who implicitly reified the values of the dominant bourgeois culture.
In contrast to critics like those cited above, more recent studies, particularly among feminist critics, have explored the cultural and aesthetic value of mid-nineteenth-century sentimentalism. Jane Tompkins's book Sensational Designs(1985) is a specific attack on Douglas's thesis that mid-nineteenth-century women writers destroyed a superior Puritan "male-dominated" tradition and advanced consumer culture and the status quo. Instead, says Tompkins, the sentimental novelists used the established value system to "effect a radical transformation of . . . society" (p. 145). Describing "sentimental power" as "a political enterprise" that spoke to "large masses of readers," Tompkins asserts that the sentimental novelists reached down to the "cultural realities" that modernist criticism has disdained (pp. 126, xiv, xiii). According to Tompkins, twentieth-century critics deliberately established literary standards that denigrated everything that nineteenth-century women writers represented: "In reaction against their world view, and perhaps even more against their success, twentieth-century critics have taught generations of students to equate popularity with debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness, religiosity with fakery, domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority" (p. 123).
During most of the second half of the twentieth century, the concept of "sentimentality" had indeed taken on negative connotations. The works by nineteenth-century women writers—even those with important cultural and literary significance—were totally excluded from high school and college syllabi, and for the most part were out of print. Alice Cary, Lydia Sigourney, Lydia Maria Child, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Maria Cummins, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Frances Harper, Elizabeth Stoddard, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Augusta Evans Wilson are among the mid-nineteenth-century writers whose names were on everyone's tongue during this period but who a hundred years later had seemingly been erased from history. Until the last two decades of the twentieth century the only nineteenth-century woman writer that American college students read was Emily Dickinson. Part of the reason for this was the literary movement called the New Criticism, which dominated literary scholarship and pedagogy during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Eschewing any discussion of social or cultural issues or emotion, and focusing wholly on the work of art as a "well-wrought urn" divorced from history, the New Critics looked for irony and ambiguity, not feeling and social reform.
Literary scholars determined what books were published and what books were read, but in terms of attitudes toward sentimentalism, the cultural climate of the time was also significant. In the 1940s and 1950s postwar American liberals, disillusioned by Joseph Stalin's purges in the Soviet Union, came to associate sentimentalism with naive ideology and turned to the pragmatic vision of a masculine America. Thus the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in his 1949 book The Vital Center, condemned the "persistent and sentimental optimism [that] has endowed Doughface progressivism with what in the middle of the twentieth century are fatal weaknesses: a weakness for impotence" (p. 40). The "man of feeling" was no longer to be admired—in politics or in literature. And sentimentality, identified as "soft," feminine, and emasculating, whether that of the mid- or late nineteenth century, was seriously out of fashion. Literary critics were repelled by or afraid of emotion and evinced what Susan Harris in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels (1990) calls a "deep-seated revulsion from the feminine" (p. 5). As Suzanne Clark notes in Sentimental Modernism (1991), this "reversal against the sentimental helped to establish avant-garde intellectuals as a discourse community defined by its adversarial relationship to domestic culture" (p. 1).
In an article in the New York Ledger titled "What Shall We Do?" (2 February 1867) Fanny Fern expressed her own determination to do what she could to address social and political issues. Even though, as a woman, she had no political power, she did what many other women writers did at the time: she used her pen.
What if you are so constituted that injustice and wrong to others rouses you as if it were done to yourself? What if the miseries of your fellow beings, particularly those you are powerless to relieve, haunt you day and night? . . . What if you cannot carry out the practically atheistic creed of so many of the present day? Of so many young men—to their shame, be it said—who with a man's chances fold their supine hands over all these abuses? . . . Well, rather than be that torpid thing, and it a man, I would rather be a woman tied hand and foot, bankrupt in chances, and worry over what I am powerless to help. At least I can stand at my post, like a good soldier, because it is my post; meantime—I had rather be taken off that by a chance shot, than rust in a corner with ossification of the heart.
Fern, Ruth Hall and Other Writings, pp. 336–337.
It was not until the late twentieth century that feminist scholars, having recovered the works of a number of nineteenth-century women writers, began to deal with the question of sentimentality. Some were embarrassed by the sentimentalism in the works, but instead of condemning the works as Douglas had done, they either ignored it or attempted to explain away the sentimentality as "subversive." Others were not bothered by the sentimentality, while still others, like Tompkins, found it a strength rather than a weakness. These latter critics have looked at sentimentalism both for its cultural significance and for its aesthetics.