The literary study of emotion is part of an important revisionary movement among scholars eager to recast emotional politics for the twenty-first century. Looking beyond the traditional categories of sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy, Jennifer Travis suggests a new approach to reading emotionalism among men. She argues that the vocabulary of injury, with its evaluations of victimhood and its assessments of harm, has deeply influenced the cultural history of emotions.

From the Civil War to the early twentieth century, Travis traces the history of male emotionalism in American...

This book reads nineteenth-century American literature in the context of emerging technologies, laws, and industries. By engaging ideas about risk and vulnerability, literature showed a shift in America's cultural ethos from lauding autonomy and mastery to promoting a sympathetic state and encouraging new forms of cultural recompense.