UC Berkeley

My dissertation, "Feeling's Forms: Theorizing Sentiment in Women's Anti-Racism Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century," centers the work of a group of overlooked and interconnected nineteenth-century women poet-activists. Diverse racially and culturally as well as in their artistry and activism, the poets I examine are brought together by two shared and interlinked goals: first, to elucidate the wrongs done to and advocate for the rights of enslaved Africans and disenfranchised Native Americans, and second, to continually and self-consciously renegotiate their use of and stance toward the sociopolitical efficacy of their poems' formal strategies. In particular, they are concerned with sentiment—a literary mode first beloved for its emotional appeal, then decried and dismissed as lachrymose, and now viewed with more nuance as both politically powerful and problematic in its single-minded focus on individual feeling. My project builds on this most recent appraisal, suggesting that contrary to the popular conception of nineteenth-century poets as writing from a wellspring of unexamined feeling, the poets I consider themselves offered theorizations that both presage and problematize contemporary critical understandings of sentiment. In dialogues both between and within their poems, these now-largely-forgotten poet-activists transform poetry and its attendant forms into a realm in which sentiment itself could be actively tested and questioned, beginning a conversation about art and activism that remains profoundly pertinent today.