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Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations beyond Sympathy. By Melanie V. Dawson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. vi + 309 pp. $85.00 cloth/$39.95 paper, ebook.
If "emotion as a subject" is the purview of the "sentimental enterprise," how then is an avowed literary realist to claim this terrain of human experience (15)? This is a central question that Melanie Dawson addresses in her new book, Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations beyond Sympathy. In it, she examines how writers from William Dean Howells and Mark Twain to Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Charles Chesnutt sought to attend to emotion as a subject while remaining true to core realist attitudes and representational commitments. By the 1870s, the expression and codification of emotion preoccupied Charles Darwin and a range of realism-friendly thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. Emotional Reinventions traces the strategies that exemplary realist writers used in "deploying and containing emotion" (42): methods for wrestling potentially destabilizing, boundaryblurring affects into a contained, stabilized form while attempting to ward off the unappealing alternative of "seeming virtually emotionless" (172).
The book consists of five chapters, each centered on a key literary figure or set of textual comparisons. The case studies often examine characters in novels and their (sometimes implicit) theories about emotional expression, although there is also discussion of literary form and readers' affective responses. The first chapter maintains that Howells, in seeking to avoid the excesses of "broadscale modes of emotion" (44), ended up confining fellow feeling (in his criticism and among his characters) to intra-class affection. The chapter treating Henry James emphasizes emotion as less a lived relation to the world and more an object of analysis in and of itself. Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors displays a "penchant for parsing emotional life instead of experiencing it" (103); he engages in "rigorous emotional cataloguing" that Dawson attributes to James the novelist and aligns with the work of natural scientists François Delsarte and Charles Darwin (103, 101). Edith Wharton's bleak novella Ethan Frome, when coupled with Darwin's and William...