Marianne Noble, Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson

The title of Marianne Noble’s new book lays out unambiguously her bold ambition, which is no less than to “rethink sympathy and human contact.” After exploring The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature in her first monograph (2000), she now offers to investigate the ways in which four writers from the 1850s and 1860s – Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and Dickinson – revisited and revised their initial understanding of sympathy over the course of their careers. Her method consists in foc...