Abstract

As a work of philosophically grounded literary criticism in the tradition of Stanley Cavell's ordinary language philosophy, Kenneth Dauber's The Logic of Sentiment: Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville will be an altogether welcomed book among those for whom it is more instructive to think sentimentality alongside literary authors than to merely historicize—to "archeologize" or "genealogize"—it from an all-too-safe critical distance. Though primarily a book on sentiment, its theoretical through line is to think skepticism outside of the epistemological, to think it in "nonepistemological terms". In line with what he elsewhere calls "ordinary language criticism," Dauber throughout the book follows the example of...