Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation examines sentimentalism, the body, and time in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American fiction, focusing in particular on the work of Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles W. Chesnutt, and H.P. Lovecraft. Reading American sentimental literature and its literary inheritors through the lens of gender and queer studies work on temporality and affect, I argue that sentimentalism not only entails but also requires a complex orientation to time. Employing queer theory methodologies which theorize the relation(s) between temporality and the body, I trace sentimentalism’s orientation to time back to its grounding in the feeling (sympathetic and affective) body. This project is particularly interested in how sentimentalism’s theory of embodied experience complicates our current theoretical paradigms of the body in time. Sentimental narratives themselves, I suggest, offer complex theories of how the affective body is intertwined with temporality and what the body’s relation to time produces, both aesthetically and politically. Therefore, though this project draws on queer methodologies to read sentimental texts, it also argues that the sentimental tradition represents a lost or unacknowledged archive for queer theory that can substantially contribute to current debates on affective historiography, exhaustion, pain, and optimism. In my reading, sentimentalism’s exploration of the relation between time and the body produces forms of alternative if not queer temporalities. In sentimentalism, the sympathetic, feeling body carries one “out of time” into new or alternative times in which other forms—of time, of action, of life—become possible.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2017
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Citation
Beach, Matthew Allen,
"Out of Time: Sentimentalism and Temporality in Long Nineteenth-Century American Literature"
(2017).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0TQ5ZZS
