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The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. By Julia A. Stern. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 1997. xiii, 306 pp. Cloth, $48.00; paper, $18.95.
The Plight of Feeling engages the early American novel as a literature of dissent. Julia Stern explores the grammar of emotion in republican fiction as it reflects and responds to the memory of armed conflict; to the exclusionary practices of national founding; and to the shift from republican visions of community, grounded in disinterested virtue and the pursuit of the common good, to the liberal ethos of interested individuality that supports the emergent forms of capitalist speculation. Focusing on Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Hannah Foster's The Coquette, and Charles Brockden Brown's...