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By Mary Louise Kete. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 280 pp. $49.95/$17.95 paper.
By Lori Merish. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 389 pp. $64.95/$21.95 paper.
Mary Louise Kete's book describes the "alien esthetic" of being moved by the sort of poetry composed by Mark Twain's Emmeline Grangerford (xi). She draws from work by Lewis Hyde, Marcel Mauss, and Mary Douglas to produce "a study that spans across the years from the formation of antebellum American culture through the aftermath of the Civil War" (7). In looking for a formal component to American sentimental practices, she ranges from the vernacular to the canonical and seeks to understand "sentimentality as a discursive mode that transcends the boundaries of genre and performs its specific cultural work through a shared set of formal features" (7). Part of what makes this study unusual is its inclusion of a nineteenth-century cultural artifact, the keep-sake album she calls Harriet Gould's Book, which contains copies and original poems lamenting the death of children. Kete also reproduces material culture elements such as photographs of flowers made from human hair and of the gravestones of children, along with reprints of the poems engraved on them.
Kete moves from a "thick description" (following the anthropologist Clifford Geertz) of Harriet Gould's Book to more canonical accounts of mourning in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar, as well as in the poetry of Lydia Sigourney and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Announcing that "sentimentality is the constitutive instrument of the middle class" (54), Kete is interested in what she calls "sentimental collaboration." She describes this as "the system of exchange in which evidence of one's affection is given in such a way as to elicit not only a return donation of affection but also a continued circulation of affection among an increasing circle of associations" (53). Writers like Phelps demonstrate the "success of sentimental collaboration as a means of reconstructing the foundations of society and...