When and why did sentimentality begin to be considered a bad thing in the western canon?
By looseFig4990
Anyone else feel like we’ve gotten super allergic to sentimental writing? I’m not totally sure, but it seems like that. I mostly say this through what I know from the Western canon, since that’s where my reading is strongest. It hit me while I was reading *Ulysses*. Joyce keeps poking holes in the parts where things might tip into too much sentimentality, and I won’t lie—it kind of bummed me out. I’ve noticed something similar in a lot of modern and post-modern stuff too, though there are a few exceptions. I like Woolf, for instance, because it feels like she can go hard on big feelings without coming off naive. Maybe it’s just easier to be clever and keep a distance than to actually handle emotions head-on? Also, I wonder if writers gradually started worrying more about sounding “too sentimental,” and that ties into a broader rise in cynicism in Western culture. So if you try to write serious literature and you lean into sentiment, people might read it as immature or whatever. Or maybe I’m just not well-read enough, and this is more about my taste—I end up gravitating toward more post-modern/experimental books anyway.