Introduction / Mary De Jong -- Rethinking Sentimental Motherhood. "These Human Flowers": Sentimentalizing Children and Fashioning Maternal Authority in Godey's Lady's Book / Kara Clevinger -- "The Medicine of Sympathy": Maternal Affective Pedagogy in Antebellum America / Ken Parille -- The Ethics of Postbellum Melancholy in the Poetry of Sarah Piatt / D. Zachary Finch -- The Politics of Sentimentality. "The Language of the Eye": Communication and Sentimental Benevolence in Lydia Sigourney's Poems and Essays about the Deaf / Elizabeth Petrino -- Lydia Maria Child's Use of Sentimentalism in Letters from New-York / Susan Toth Lord -- Sympathetic Jo: Tomboyism, Poverty, and Race in Alcott's Little Women / Kristen Proehl -- Loss, Death, Mourning and Grief. Desired and Imagined Loss as Sympathetic Identification: Bachelor Melancholia in Donald Grant Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor / Maglina Lubovich -- The Collaborative Construction of a Death-Defying Cryptext: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass / Adam Bradford -- "Such Verses for My Body Let Us Write": Civil War Song, Sentimentalism, and Whitman's Drum-Taps / Robert Arbour -- Psychological Sentimentalism: Consciousness, Affect, and the Sentimental Henry James / George Gordon-Smith -- Afterword / Mary Louise Kete.