Description: Focusing on the genre of poetry, Kete argues that sentimentality functioned within the American Romantic period as a mode by which subjects fashioned a system of values which tended to define middle-class in the19th century.
Review Quotes: "This book is an original and compelling study of a highly significant but largely neglected tradition of American poetry. More than that, it is a brilliant revaluation of the central role of sentimentality (in fiction as well as poetry) in the construction of nineteenth-century American middle-class culture. The result is a major work in the field of American Studies that has sweeping and important implications for the related fields of feminist and gender studies, and for cultural studies generally."--Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University