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The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. By JULIA A. STERN.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. $48.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.
In The Plight of Feeling, Julia Stern fleshes out the old historiographical notion that the Federalist epoch was an "age of passion" (i) through rich affective readings of several novels written between I789 and I799. In brief analyses of Brown's The Power of Sympathy (I789) and Brockden Brown's Wieland (I798), followed by lengthy exegeses of Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791/94), Foster's The Coquette (I797), and Brockden Brown's Ormond (I799), Stern pays careful attention to the poetics and politics of form as she meticulously probes her alternative archive of "gothic and feminized . . . counternarratives" for the challenges and complications they pose to "male-authored manifest accounts of national legitimation" (z). Following Cathy N. Davidson, Stern finds registered in these novels the costs of the Founding to those excluded from the new nation-women, aliens, the poor, Native Americans, and African Americans-and observes how the fin-de-siecle passions she locates in Federalist-era fiction are organized around the violence and grief of these exclusions.
Like two other recent studies that have explored the political significance of sentiment and the symbolism of gender and the family in early American fiction, Shirley Samuels's Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996) and Elizabeth Barnes's States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, I997), The Plight of Feeling uses the oncemaligned literature of sentiment to uncover the affective and psychological consequences of the Founding. As Jay Fliegelman has influentially shown, the psychic ramifications of the Founding centered...