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Virtuous poor characters figure prominently in nineteenth-century American literature. American writers borrowed conventions for representing the poor from eighteenth-century British literature of sensibility and adapted them to deliberate the significance of poverty and virtue for their own developing national identity. Characters who are poor and morally pure from birth, as well as characters who become poor and gain virtues through narrative events, are particularly important to domestic fiction since poverty is a key plot element of many domestic novels. This dissertation examines the best-known domestic novels of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Susan Warner---<italic> A New-England Tale</italic> and <italic>The Wide, Wide World</italic>, respectively---along with now-obscure works by each author to illustrate both the persistence of virtuous poor figures across the nineteenth century and the broad range of their significance. Differences between Sedgwick's and Warner's treatments of the virtuous poor, and contradictory uses of the topos within the same work, point to the complexity of assumptions and concerns expressed through these conventional characters. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, virtuous poor characters served as a ground on which to debate the meaning of categories like rich, poor, and middle class in a democracy. And because the discourse of class was deeply imbricated with other aspects of social identity---such as nationality, race, ethnicity, and gender---the virtuous poor were also invoked in arguments over immigration, urbanization, religion, slavery, race relations, and marriage. Readings of relevant texts by American and British writers including Timothy Dwight, William Ellery Channing, Lydia Sigourney, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Samuel Richardson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Hannah More establish the key transatlantic contexts in which Sedgwick and Warner deployed their sentimental conventions. Chapters on Sedgwick's didactic series dedicated to the working class and on Warner's Sunday School fiction demonstrate the vitality of debates carried on through virtuous poor figures in even the most self-consciously conventional sentimental novels. |
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