Love's whipping boy violence and sentimentality in the American imagination - Barnes, Elizabeth (University of North Carolina Press, 2011)
Includes bibliographical references and index
Introduction -- Wieland, familicide, and the suffering father -- Melville's fraternal melancholies -- Fathers of violence: Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and the radical reproduction of sensibility -- The death of boyhood and the making of Little women
Working to reconcile the Christian dictum to "love one's neighbor as oneself" with evidence of U.S. sociopolitical aggression, including slavery, corporal punishment of children, and Indian removal, Barnes focuses on aggressors--rather than the weak or abused--to understand paradoxical relationships between empathy, violence, and religion that took hold so strongly in nineteenth-century American culture