Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860

by Jane Tompkins

What makes a literary classic? In "Sensational Designs" Jane Tompkins argues that it is not the intrinsic merit of a text, but rather the circumstances of its writing. Against the modernist belief that art, in order to be art, must be free from propaganda, Tompkins contends that writers like Brockden Brown, Cooper, Stowe, and Warner wrote in order to alter the face of the social world, not to elicit aesthetic appreciation.Thus, the value and significance of the novels, for readers of their time, depended on precisely those characteristics that formalist criticism has taught us to stereotyped characters, sensational plots, and cliched language.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, History, American History, 20th Century, 19th Century, Lit Crit

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Jane Tompkins (born 1940) is an American literary scholar who has worked on canon formation, feminist literary criticism, and reader response criticism.[1] She has helped develop the idea of cultural work in literary studies.[2] She earned her PhD at Yale in 1966 and subsequently taught at Temple University, Duke University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.[3]

Reviews

[Emily Demmert · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, Jane Tompkins is incredibly accessible for a lit critic. Second, her idea that Antebellum texts do cultural work is exactly right! Without saying it outright, Tompkins shows how the American literary canon has been controlled and how many texts, especially from women, we are missing out on because of a few men’s views of what the canon should be. Heavy sigh…

[Ava Chuppe · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book's premise that literary value is subjective and context-dependent seems pretty intuitive to me, although I know this is a seminal text that likely contributed to this now-accepted belief in the first place. I do enjoy Tompkins' work to bring more women into the canon, of course. I feel the argument repeated itself a lot, but emphasis was probably important here, too. As others have said, an accessible work of literary criticism.

[Maria]

Tompkins maintains that ideas of literary value and canonicity are culturally constructed, and she argues that works by women and popular texts deserve more critical attention. A very influential (and readable) piece of scholarship.
(Read for my PhD major fields)

[Sarah]

I'm currently reading this book to use as part of my dissertation. Tompkins looks back at novels that were popular 100+ years ago and then were dropped from the literary canon because they didn't meet the criteria of what the modernists thought was Great Literature. She shows that these books were doing important "cultural work," in that the authors had "designs" on their readers and wrote their novels in order to promote social change or change their readers' beliefs. A familiar example is Uncle Tom's Cabin--wildly popular in its time, then lost, then reclaimed later but still reads like a smarmy, melodramatic, unbelievable novel. Hard to enjoy it by today's standards, but in its time it was well-loved and met readers' expectations for a good read. My own comparison would be the reality-tv boom right now--SO popular, but not destined to stand the test of time. Yet in our culture at this moment, the popularity of reality tv speaks volumes about our culture.

[Celia Lisset Alvarez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed forever the way I feel about literature. I had explored the idea of the canon before, and mused about why some books are considered classics and others are not, but I had not read a convincing explanation until this book. Although limited to C-19 American fiction, this book takes apart the notion that canonical works are superior in some absolute way, and repositions novels usually marginalized as inferior--bestselling novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin--in the historical context in which they were produced, revealing how our perceptions of what makes for "good" literature have changed to reflect biases against women and minorities. If I could, I'd make everybody read this book.

[Adrienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sensational Designs is one of those foundational books if you want to know more about 19th century women and their literature. It defends sentimental literature as a valid point of discussion and of the women's lives, in contrast to someone like Ann Douglas, who, on the other side of the coin, doesn't find anything positive about these women because they didn't start a revolution in their repressive society--at least not her kind of revolution.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most thrilling piece of literary criticism I've ever read, and I read quite a bit of it during my many years in Grad school. Tompkins' analysis of several works of American fiction from 1790 - 1860 (including Uncle Tom's Cabin and Last of the Mohicans) is actually more entertaining than the works she is analyzing. The peak of new historicism.

[Michelle Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tompkins confirmed my suspicions about Hawthorne. Have things really changed since 1985?

[April · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really nice defense of non-canonical texts! Tompkins puts out a pretty sound argument and I have a feeling I am gong to refer to this book again and again. I love it to be quite honest.

[Andrew Pisano · Rating 4 out of 5]

read selections. important, foundational study of sentimental fiction.