The Female Complaint - The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant's groundbreaking national sentimentality project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural intimate public in the United States, a women's culture distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, women's books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman's life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are.

Pairing literary criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the territory of this intimate public sphere through close readings of U.S. women's literary works and their stage and film adaptations. The Female Complaint is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.