UCLA

“Modern Sentimentalism” chronicles the myriad ways in which sentimentalism evolves as modernism emerges. I demonstrate that sentimental aesthetics are more complex than we have thought and that these aesthetics participate in modern literary innovation. I likewise demonstrate that modernity, and the American interwar period in particular, enjoys a more complex relation to the sentimental than we have understood, and that twentieth-century constructs of gender and emotion equally revise and restyle sentimental precedent. Finally, I demonstrate that, when it comes to analyzing historical cultures of feeling, contemporary theories of affect have much to gain from archival methods. Synthesizing these claims, I identify a new form of feeling in modern aesthetic experience. Neither an idealized lapse into the past nor a naïve vision of the future, what I call “modern sentimentalism” most often registers the ironic consciousness of an enduring sentimental impulse.

“Modern Sentimentalism” thus overturns conventional notions of sentimentalism as a nineteenth-century style antithetical to modern artistic innovation and to representations of modern sensibility. Participating in recent efforts to contextualize modernism and adding new historical and formalist dimensions to theories of twentieth-century sentimentality and affect, I reconstruct sentiment’s authoritative influence in the interwar period’s shifting constructions of gender, race, and sexuality; emergent concepts of emotional experience like “ambivalence” and “empathy”; and evolving literary interests like irony and stream-of-consciousness narration.

“Modern Sentimentalism” thus enriches our understanding of the originality and experimentation that characterize modernist-era literary production. At the same time, this project elucidates an archive of fiction by female authors, including lesser-known novels by canonical figures like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather and texts by under-studied authors like Anita Loos, Frances Newman, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. These authors idiosyncratically revise and update the aesthetic paradigm that forms a modern woman writer’s most obvious inheritance, but their novels collectively establish that interwar concepts of gender, emotion, and literature do not simply break with a sentimental past. Rather, these authors and their inventive modern novels signal how sentimentalism transforms with the times.