Feelings of Expectation: Consolation and Sentimental Allegory in the Contemporary Novel

Abstract: This article intervenes in a debate about literary consolation by bracketing categorical questions about the political efficacy of sentiment in order to reconceive solace as a property of narrative. It reads two contemporary novels set in the antebellum and Civil War-US where consolation appears as an expectation of feeling yoked to the sentimental, a cultural mode that translates social problems into a metaphysical realm of feeling. Therefore, the ambivalences of consolation allegorize the structural determinants—racial capitalism and self-possessive personhood—that the sentimental obscures. Reading consolation dialectically, I show how narrative expectations of feeling mediate whiteness as a feeling of expectation.