Cultural criticism conclusion referec introduction

CONCLUSION
Although analysis of sentimental texts has focused primarily on cultural criticism, a number of scholars have also looked at the aesthetics of the genre. What such scholars have recognized is that sentimental texts must be looked at within the context of their own value system. Modernist criteria have only served to denigrate the sentimental. For most of the twentieth century it was impossible to undertake literary analysis of sentimental texts because they were considered by modernism to be inherently nonliterary. Developments in other disciplines also helped to pave the way for the feminist reevaluation of nineteenth-century women's writings. With the New Historicism and Foucauldian theory asking questions about authority and challenging the concept of objective truth, scholars began to question the modernist criteria that had consigned sentimental literature to the dustheap. In the 1980s and 1990s, following Tompkins's assertion in Sensational Designs that sentimental writing is "complex and significant" and the titular question in Susan Harris's 1991 essay "But Is It Any Good?" critics began to look at sentimental texts as one might look at texts in any genre—examining the text within a specific set of conventions and assessing the literary techniques employed by the author.
In her 1997 essay "Reclaiming Sentimental Literature," Joanne Dobson focuses on two aspects of sentimental rhetoric: the use of language and troping practices, both of which, she says, illustrate the "effectiveness of sentimentalism's rhetoric" and the "authenticity of its sentiment" (p. 269). The language, she says, is accessible and understated, almost conversational, because the goal of sentimental literature is communication. The most common tropes are metaphors for the threat of the destruction of human connections. These tropes are consistent with the thematic concerns of sentimental literature, which, she says, emphasize "relational experience and the consequences of its rupture" (p. 268).
Some scholars have traced the historic beginnings of aesthetic theory and its relationship to sentimentalism.