Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature(New Americanists)

A consideration of the intricate relationship between consumption and womanhood in the late-18th and 19th centuries. Taking as her starting point a diversity of cultural artefacts - from domestic fiction and philosophical treatises to advice literature and cigars - Lori Merish explores the symbolic functions they served and finds that consumption evolved into a form of personal expressiveness that indicated not only a woman's wealth and taste but also her race, class, morality and civic values. The discursive production of this new subjectivity - the feminine consumer - was remarkably influential, helping to shape American capitalism, culture, and nation building.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: The Forms of Cultured Feeling 1. Embodying Gender: Sentimental Materialism in the New Republic 2. Gender, Domesticity, and Consumption in the 1830s: Caroline Kirkland, Catharine Sedgwick, and the Feminization of American Consumerism 3. Sentimental Consumption: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Aesthetics of Middle-Class Ownership 4. Domesticating “Blackness”: Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and the Decommodification of the Black Female Body 5. Fashioning a Free Self: Consumption, Politics, and Power in the Writings of Elizabeth Keckley and Frances Harper 6. Not “Just a Cigar”: Commodity Culture and the Construction of Imperial Manhood Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Lori Merish is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University.

Review :
"Important not just for the way it brings together a stunning variety of primary materials but for the productive new readings it offers of well-known and lesser-known literary texts, of ante- and post-bellum women's culture, the history of consumerism, and the practice of 'personal life' in nineteenth-century U.S. culture. Sentimental Materialism is full of both subtle and striking insights."--Dana Nelson, author of National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men "Ranging powerfully from the Scottish Enlightenment to the Cuban cigar, Lori Merish furnishes the culture of sentimentalism with a commodity logic and a political form. Detailing the emergence of feminine consumer subjectivity, Merish reveals the commercial artefacts crucial to sentimental education; locating the varieties of female subjection in the culture facilitated by sentimental fiction, she demonstrates the liberal-individual production of its emotional selves. The result is a national romance of property in which Merish acutely finds a whole new approach to women's writing, the society of slavery, the spiritual qualities of manufactured things, and the law of the market not as sentimental culture's antithesis but as its very foundation."--Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class