Sentimental Activism

Sentimental aesthetics have come to vex contemporary literature. The relation between feeling and acting is increasingly contested, and emotional entanglements in the lives of others often seem suspect. Literary criticism, meanwhile, wrestles with its own purpose when confronting representations of vulnerability, inequity, and injustice.

David James explores what happens when writers’ affective ambitions coincide with criticism’s hunger for social consequence. He considers caregiving activists, illness memoirists, and writers of poverty and migration who are not simply reclaiming sentimental forms but also foregrounding their aesthetic, ethical, and political potency. These works of “sentimental activism” solicit readers’ emotional engagement while also testing models for political change in the historical and cultural specificity of the experiences they depict. They ask readers to recognize their positions of privilege, the perils of universalism, and the thresholds of compassion.

James brings a surprising variety of genres into conversation, including fiction by Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, Douglas Stuart, and Valeria Luiselli alongside works of pathography, medical advocacy, and humanitarian protest by Anne Boyer, Havi Carel, Josie George, Rebecca Loncraine, Rachel Clarke, Christie Watson, and Tima Kurdi. Reluctant to leave readers dwelling in pathos alone, these writers aspire to move us yet also move us to action. Sentimental Activism shows how this aspiration continues to shape how writers and critics alike fathom the transformative work literature might perform.