brutality. Unfeelingness is the counter-position and inevitably suffers from the same defects." [Carl Jung: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 143] Dissensions Complications enter into the ordinary view of sentimentality, however, when changes in fashion and setting— the "climate of thought"—intrude between the work and the reader. The view that sentimentality is relative is inherent in John Ciardi's "sympathetic contract", in which the reader agrees to join with the writer when approaching a poem. The example of the death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), "a scene that for many readers today might represent a defining instance of sentimentality", brought tears to the eye of many highly critical readers of the day. The reader of Dickens, Richard Holt Hutton observed, "has the painful impression of pathos feasting upon itself." "Recent feminist theory has clarified the use of the term as it applies to the genre" of the sentimental novel, stressing the way that 'different cultural assumptions arising from the oppression of women gave liberating significance to the works' piety and mythical power to the ideals of the heroines".Sentimental fallacy The sentimental fallacy' is an ancient rhetorical device that attributes human emotions, such as grief or anger, to the forces of nature. This is also known as the pathetic fallacy, "a term coined by John Ruskin ... for the practice of attributing human emotions to the inanimate or unintelligent world"—as in "the sentimental poetic trope of the 'pathetic fallacy', beloved of Theocritus, Virgil and their successors" in the pastoral tradition. The term is also used more indiscriminately to discredit any argument as being based on a misweighting of emotion: "sentimental fallacies...that men, that we, are better—nobler—than we know ourselves to be"; "the 'sentimental fallacy' of constructing novels or plays 'out of purely emotional patterns. See also Notes References Alvarez, A. (1967). Introduction to A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne. London: Penguin. Anderson, Digby, and Peter Mullen, eds., Faking It (1988). Berlant, Lauren Gail (2008). The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Booth, Wayne (1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Ciardi, John (1959). How Does a Poem Mean? Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Cupchik, G. C. and J. Laszlo (1992). Emerging Visions of the Aesthetic Process: Psychology, Semiology, and Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fitter, Chris (1995). Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory. New York: