On Sentimentality

According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, sentimentality is "at the defining centre of [...] many judgements, political as well as aesthetic" that impinge today on "every issue of national identity, postcolonial populism, religious fundamentalism, high versus mass culture, relations among races, to children, to other species, to the earth, as well as most obviously between and within genders and sexualities".

If that is true, what might be at stake in the fact that Victorian culture still represents the locus classicus of the sentimental?

This seminar offers an extended opportunity to think about the category of the sentimental, as viewpoint, spectacle, attribution and accusation, across a number of periods, places and disciplines. The afternoon will include refreshments and will begin with a position paper by Dr. Nicola Bown (Birkbeck).

 For preliminary ideas, see:

• Arscott, Caroline. in Giles Waterfeild, ed. Art for the People (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1994).
• Bell, Michael. Sentimentality in Victorian Literature and Culture (London: Palgrave, 2000).
• Bown, Nicola. 'Introduction: Crying over Little Nell', 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 4 (2007), 1-13. [Available online]
• Ellison, Julie. Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
• Kaplan, Fred. Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987).
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 'Some Binarisms (II): Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations of the Male Body', Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 131-182.
• Solomon, Robert. 'In Defence of Sentimentality', Philosophy and Literature (1990), 304-323 [available online].
• Stoddart, Judith. 'Tracking the Sentimental Eye' in Suzy Anger, ed. Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001).
• Tanner, Michael. 'Sentimentality', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 77 (1976-1977), 127-147. [Available online]