Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. By Julia A. Stern. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xiv, 306 pp. Cloth, $48.00, isbn 0-226-77310-8. Paper, $18.95, isbn 0-226-77311-6.)

In The Plight of Feeling, Julia A. Stern joins the chorus of recent literary critics who read American novels of the 1790s as essentially political documents. In dense, detailed analyses of Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791), Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797), and Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond (1799), Stern argues that these novels use the formal resources of fiction to present complex political theory, visions of the new republic's democratic potential, and diagnoses of its already divisive problems. Taken together, she suggests, these novels "elaborate, in fictive form, a collective mourning over the violence of the Revolution and the preemption of liberty" while also contemplating "the possibility that the power of genuine sympathy could revivify a broadly inclusive vision of democracy." . . .

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