...Karen L. Kilcup Karen L. Kilcup, “Feeling American in the Poetic Republic” (pp. 299–335) Recent scholarship concerning nineteenth-century American poetry has challenged petrified attitudes that depict it as almost exclusively sentimental, unoriginal, and meritless. Yet, absent a historicized...

... California Bandit (1854). Through their investment in sentimental tropes such as the tearful scene, the angelic figure, and the untimely fainting fit, these women enact what I term a transamerican sentimental diplomacy that counters the attempt of the novel's men to define the United States via...