Cultural criticism conclusion referec introduction

1.SENTIMENTALISM
Emerging in England in the mid- to late eighteenth century, and reflecting a similar trend in continental literature at the time, literary sentimentalism or "sensibility" prioritized feeling. It developed primarily as a middle-class phenomenon, reflecting the emphasis on compassion or feeling as a desirable character trait in the newly emergent middle class. Although, on the one hand, the reader might take pleasure in feeling itself, in England by the 1770s the rise of sensibility was also linked to a growing activism—the awareness of and concern for the suffering of others reflected in, for example, the antislavery movement, concerns about child labor, and the campaigns for better hospitals, prison reform, and charity schools as well as in the response to the suffering associated with the rapid rise of industrial capitalism and the urban misery caused by exploitative labor practices.
The following lines from Hannah More's (1745–1833) poem "Sensibility" (1782) sum up the varied attitudes involved in sensibility: the pleasure that one derives from feeling; the heartfelt moral dictate to do the right thing; and the way in which feeling inspires activism:
Sweet Sensibility! Thou keen delight!
Thou hasty moral! Sudden sense of right!
Thou untaught goodness! Virtue's precious seed!
Thou sweet precursor of the gen'rous deed!
(Ll. 337–340)
The word "sentimental" is first known to have appeared in print in English in the 1740s. Becoming almost immediately popular, the term was used to describe the emotional state of a sensitive and "genteel" person, and sentiment began to play an important role in literature. As Louis Bredvold notes, "Drama and fiction had discovered that pathos could best soften the heart and raise the tear that betokens humanity" (pp. 416, 433). Among the earliest British novels that heralded the rise of sentimentalism were Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa (1747–1748); Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766); Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768); and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771). According to Paul Langford, Mackenzie's novel was a "deliberate attempt to portray the sentimentalist as a benevolent man" (p. 481). To be a "man of feeling" became a desirable goal even among middle-class men of business.
The sentimental novel first made its way across the Atlantic in the form of the seduction narrative. After William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy appeared in 1789, Susanna Rowson's (1762–1824) Charlotte Temple (1794) became America's first bestseller. Rowson's novel inspired feeling, and generations of readers, men and women from all classes, wept over the hapless Charlotte's fate. Many of those readers were so moved by the novel that they made the pilgrimage to the heroine's presumed grave in Trinity Churchyard in New York, leaving flowers and other mementos. Yet as Cathy Davidson points out, it is a mistake to think of the novel as only sentimental. Subtitled A Tale of Truth, it portrays an all-too-common and very realistic situation: the seduction and betrayal of an innocent and ignorant young girl and her subsequent death in childbirth. Addressing the young female reader, Rowson assures her that, as Davidson notes, "she is not alone in a world in which she has no legal or political identity," where women are trivialized, and where the sexual double standard prevails ("Introduction," p. xvii). As Rowson says in her preface, compassion inspired her to write the novel, and she hopes that her words will help to prevent some of the miseries that she chronicles (p. 6).
During certain periods in American history, sentimentalism has been particularly evident in literature. One such period was the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, during which, as Jaime Harker points out, the "muckrakers" used a sentimental appeal to feeling in order to bring about social and economic reform (p. 56). Upton Sinclair's 1905 novel The Jungle, for example, vividly portrays moving scenes of the miserable working and living conditions of immigrants in the unregulated meat-packing industry. Essentially a middle-class movement, Progressivism was promoted by Protestant ministers, and Progressives often used religious rhetoric to attack the injustices of industrial capitalism.