Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson. By Marianne Noble

Marianne Noble's Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is an assiduous contribution to the ongoing scholarly reconsideration of sympathy in the nineteenth century. The book richly illustrates the resurging interest in aesthetic philosophy and psychoanalytic frameworks in early and nineteenth-century American literary studies. Rethinking Sympathy’s greatest intervention is to recast eighteenth-century German philosopher J.G. Herder as an essential respondent to Hume's theories of sympathy. The book's most significant provocation is the notional assertion that mid-nineteenth-century writers anticipate twentieth-century thinking. Noble addresses her potential critics directly in the book's fifth chapter. Responding to Joanne Dobson's claim that we must read Dickinson as “an antebellum author firmly rooted in women's and sentimental culture” and not as a “proto-Modernist,” Noble contends these distinctions are “a false opposition” (228). She argues it is precisely Dickinson's grounding in her cultural moment that explains her “cultivations of a proto-Modernist phenomenological aesthetic” and...