In Declarations of Sentimentalism: American Women's Writing 1850-1900 I argue that sentimentalism is a form of political rhetoric allowing white and African American women writers of the antebellum, postbellum and post-Reconstruction eras to address issues of gender, class and race. Addressing such issues as urbanization, shifting economic systems, slavery, abolitionism, suffrage, women's rights, and racism, the texts covered in this study are determined by their writer's societal, cultural and political contexts. By the writers' participation in these discussions, I argue that these texts are also societally, culturally and politically determining.

Sentimentalism's reliance upon pathos makes the readers, if only temporarily, become the characters or relate to them in intimate ways: this is the source of sentimentalism's appeal and rhetorical effectiveness.  In its ability to spark public sympathy, benevolence, action and reform, sentimentalism is an effective rhetorical mode for enacting individual, social or political change often across the barriers of race and class.  My critical stance is informed by late twentieth-century feminist and cultural history reading strategies and my role as critic is, to quote Claudia Tate, not that of an apologist but "a decoder." Contextualization and historicization are of tantamount importance to my readings of these novels.

Declarations of Sentimentalism begins with a discussion of how Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World and Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter use sentimentalism to interrogate aspects of antebellum society.  In Chapter Two, "Spectre Mothers and Self-Reliance in Susan Warner's Queechy and Maria Susanna Cummins's Mabel Vaughan," I examine how Warner's and Cummins's lesser known second novels move the sentimental genre in more radical directions and anticipate questions America will need to address in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, particularly economic systems, urbanization, Western expansionism, class issues, the "Woman Question," and slavery.  In the third chapter, "Dialogic Silences in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl and Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride," I  juxtapose sentimentally informed texts by two women from antebellum North Carolina.  Both write to engage the issue of slavery yet differ in their ideology and use of sentimental rhetoric.  In Chapter Four, "Women and Work in Louisa May Alcott's Work and Lillie Devereux Blake's Fettered for Life," I shift the focus to the postbellum North where suffrage and women's employment become the predominant motif within an altered yet recognizably sentimental novel format.  I end this study with "New True Womanhood in Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy and Pauline E. Hopkins's Contending Forces," which examines novels using aspects of sentimentalism to confront a range of topics within the racism and sexism of post Reconstruction society--issues which usher in the twentieth century.

Sentimentalism's reliance upon pathos makes the readers, if only temporarily, become the characters or relate to them in intimate ways: this is the source of sentimentalism's appeal and rhetorical effectiveness.  In its ability to spark public sympathy, benevolence, action and reform, sentimentalism is an effective rhetorical mode for enacting individual, social or political change, often across the barriers of race and class.