Archaeology of Sympathy

The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema

Chandler James

In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture – a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people's very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being. In what is sure to become a critical classic, "An Archaeology of Sympathy" challenges Sergei Eisenstein's influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. James Chandler begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, he reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra's "It Happened One Night", "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town", and "It's a Wonderful Life". Chandler then moves forward to romanticism and modernism – two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental – examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work. Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, "An Archaeology of Sympathy" casts new light on the long eighteenth century and the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.

Content

Preface
Introduction The Sentimental Mode

Part 1: The Capraesque
1. Capra's America
2. Capra Remakes Capra
3. Cinema as a Medium of Sentiment

Part 2: The Making of Literary Sentimentalism
4. The Case of the Literary Spectator
5. Sentimental Journeys, Vehicular States
6. The Emergence of Sentimental Probability
7. Sentimental Monstrosity

Part 3: Against Sentiment
8. Romanticism
9. Modernism

Coda
Notes
Index

About the Author

James Chandler is the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including "England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism", also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"'An Archaeology of Sympathy' is cultural history of the first order. It unfolds thrillingly, as a kind of project of media archaeology, showing us in eye-opening ways the crucial roles that the sentimental mode accords to notions of virtual spectatorship and mediated feeling. I found myself fascinated by the historical argument about sentimentalism's relation to episodes of media shift. This book has changed the way I think about books and movies" – Deidre Lynch, University of Toronto

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