The Sentimental Touch:The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism: The Language of Feeling in the Age of ManagerialismBetween 1850 and 1940, with the rise of managerial capitalism in the United States, the most powerful businesses ceased to be family owned, instead becoming sprawling organizations controlled by complex bureaucracies. Sentimental literature--work written specifically to convey and inspire deep feeling--does not seem to fit with a swiftly bureaucratizing society. Surprisingly, though, sentimental language persisted in American literature, even as a culture of managed systems threatened to obscure the power of individual affect. The Sentimental Touch explores the strange, enduring power of sentimental language in the face of a rapidly changing culture. Analyzing novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and Nathanael West, the book demonstrates that sentimental language changes but remains powerful, even in works by authors who self-consciously write against the sentimental tradition. Sentimental language has an afterlife, enduring in American literature long after authors and critics declared it dead, insisting that human feeling can resist a mechanizing culture and embodying, paradoxically, the way that literary conventions themselves become mechanical and systematic. |
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The Sentimental Touch: The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism Aaron Ritzenberg No preview available - 2012 |
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Adam Smith Adventures of Huckleberry aesthetic alienation Anderson anonymous argues Babbitt becomes bodily Braverman bullet-watch bureaucratic Camfield Chandler characters communication critics critique declares deep domestic Doyle economic Eliza emotional episode explains feeling George Grotesque Harry Braverman heart Huck's Huckleberry Finn human individual Jim's Labor and Monopoly legible letters literary lives managerial capitalism managerial culture manipulation Mark Twain mechanical mind Miss Lonelyhearts modern modernist moral sense philosophy narrative narrator Nathanael West nostalgia offers Ohio physical political raft readers realism relationship Reprint response Sam Walton Sawyer scene Scientific Management seems sensibility senti sentimental body sentimental language sentimental literature sentimental novel sentimental texts sentimental touch sentimental tropes Sherwood Anderson signals signify silence slave slavery social society story Stowe Stowe’s structure sympathy tears timental tion Tom Sawyer Tom’s truth Uncle Tom's Cabin unsentimental utopian Visible Hand Wash West’s Winesburg words workers writes York