Sentimental Materialism

"Ranging powerfully from the Scottish Enlightenment to the Cuban cigar, Lori Merish furnishes the culture of sentimentalism with a commodity logic and a political form. She finds, in fact, a whole new approach to women's writing, the society of slavery, the spiritual qualities of manufactured things, and the law of the market considered not as sentimental culture's antithesis but as its very foundation."--Eric Lott, author of "Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class "