SOURCE: Barnes, Elizabeth. “Affecting Relations: Pedagogy, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Sympathy.” American Literary History 8, no. 4 (winter 1996): 597-614.

In the following essay, Barnes looks at The Power of Sympathy in light of the American Revolution, characterizing the novel as a complex work concerned with individual rights, authority, and the role of sentimentality.

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The late eighteenth century not only marks America's entrance into the political arena as an autonomous nation, it marks the emergence of an American literature that both signals and helps solidify that national identity. Managing the marriage of political and literary ingenuity in true republican style, the “first American novel,” William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy: Or, the Triumph of Nature (1789), locates the conflicts of a newly emerging political body in the individual bodies of its middle-class characters.¹ It then dramatizes these conflicts in the context of the family structure. Through its sensational story line...