This chapter argues that antebellum sensationalism, broadly defined, offers a key archive for understanding the emotional life of capitalism. The first half of the chapter examines the period’s two best-selling novels, George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and argues that sensationalism adopts and makes use of the affective excesses of melodrama. The chapter shows how, repeatedly, these and other sensational texts stage characters whose postures of emotional distress reflect a desire for spiritual meaning and social connection that transcends the modern, rational world of capitalism – that which Max Weber famously describes in terms of “disenchantment.” The second half of the chapter turns to urban sensationalism. Here, the chapter contends that most of these popular texts revolve around a sentimental logic whereby the tears of the financially distressed act as the markers of middle-class sensibility. Affect thus becomes an alternate currency. The chapter concludes with the most canonical example of urban sensation fiction: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). The argument here is that “Bartleby” turns the emotional registers of sensationalism inside out. For though Bartleby is the melodramatic and sentimental victim of capitalism and disenchantment, he also rejects the emotional gestures of these genres.

Genealogically rooted in the Gothic, melodrama, and prose romance of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sensationalism proliferated and even intensified throughout the 1870s as authors sought new forms of emotional and visceral connection with their increasingly desensitized readers. This essay recovers this somewhat more knowing second decade as the ‘post-sensational seventies,’ wherein the ‘post’ is understood in the same way that it might be if conjoined within other more familiar compounds, such as ‘post-colonial’ or ‘post-feminist,’ not as beyond a phenomenon that is past but rather as grappling self-consciously with the legacies, internal contradictions, possibilities, and pervasiveness of a set of practices that are still very much present. Ultimately, recognizing the 1870s as post-sensational means acknowledging that novelistic representations shifted decisively to accommodate the coincidental, the criminal, the nonrational, and the scandalous, as well as structurally resistant forms of gender and class, as constituent fractions of the real.

The history of the print media”s engagement with sexuality is a topic of enormous complexity. Depictions of sexuality in the periodical press are shaped by cultural attitudes and beliefs, representational and reporting practices, political economies, and audiences across time and space. The print media have been richly social since their inception, and all but the most rigorously controlled media systems have covered topics of a sexual nature. Sexuality has been represented as an object of social regulation, a topic of prurient interest, a problem to be solved, regulated, or eradicated, a form of commerce, and even a patriotic or religious duty. The press has played a major role in the modern project of demarcating normal sex and sexual subjects from deviant practices and identities. It has fomented moral panics around sexuality and helped liberalize sexual norms, sometimes simultaneously. The commercial, advertising-driven press developed in tandem with the sexual content it contained, and has long been a vehicle for racialized narratives of rape, imperiled femininity, and vice, adultery, and divorce. Through advertisements, classifieds, and specialized content in “obscene” journals, print media have, in some contexts, advertised sexual services and even brought people together for various types of sex.

The chapter explores the emergence of the American short story in the context of a “culture of wonder” that dominated the Atlantic world of print prior to Washington Irving. Although ghost stories, and tales of apparitions and witchcraft were often discarded as formless pieces, these “small tales” were widely reprinted in the pages of early transatlantic magazines, fostering sensational effects as well as transgressive stories about individuals whose behavior was outside the norm. The chapter examines the circulation of early short narratives in the context of serialized imprints such as magazines and newspapers. It focuses on popular topics such as ghost stories and sensationalistic tales. Moreover, the chapter unearths the rich archive of transatlantic storytelling, demonstrating how the short form combines oral and textual performances conditioning the nineteenth-century tale as it can be found in the writings of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe.

The ascendancy of French political power supported literary success and scientific achievement. Investigators such as Lagrange, Laplace, and Lavoisier gave mathematical and empirical support to modern chemistry, physics, and biology. In parallel, philosophical discourses on psychology led to a reinterpretation of Descartes’ formulation to focus on sensation. Condillac, Bonnet, and La Mettrie argued for the equation of mental operations and sensory input, with the result that they reduced psychology to sensation. Helvétius and Cabanis attempted to back off from such extremism by asserting the mediating role of a central ego, although both remained committed to sensory physiology. Biran and Comte recognized the consequences of reducing psychology to mere sensory physiology, but each worked out separate solutions. Biran rejected sensationalism as inadequate, suggesting an individual psychology based on consciousness and the will. In contrast Comte ultimately accepted sensationalism and dismissed psychology. For him, the individual person should properly be studied by physiology; the individual behaving in a group is the province of sociology. Comte, however, advocated a spirit of objective observation that was eventually useful to psychology. Thus, the successors to Descartes in France left psychology in a somewhat tenuous position, removed from recognition as a formal discipline.