States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel

by Elizabeth Barnes

Overview

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231108799
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	10/08/1997
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	0.37(w) x 6.00(h) x 9.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth Barnes is associate professor of English at the College of William and Mary.

What People are Saying About This

Shirley Samuels

Barnes connects the seduction plots of eighteenth-century novels with the domestic turmoil in mid-nineteenth-century fiction to produce a provocative narrative about the transformations of sympathy and identification in the new nation.

Editorial Reviews

Barnes connects the seduction plots of eighteenth-century novels with the domestic turmoil in mid-nineteenth-century fiction to produce a provocative narrative about the transformations of sympathy and identification in the new nation.

Shirley Samuels

Barnes covers a lot of textual ground in articulating her assertion that 'American culture's preoccupation with familial feeling as the foundation for sympathy, and sympathy as the basis of a democratic republic, ultimately confounds the difference between familial and social bonds.' She makes her argument by referring to a wide variety of literary texts and to a number of philosophers, including Locke, Paine, and Francis Hutcheson.

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