Resumen de Lisa Mendelman, Modern Sentimentalism: Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America

Marta Figlerowicz (res.)

• Anton Chekhov's “The Lady with the Dog” (1899) ponders the end of a century and a cultural epoch. Over twenty years prior, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877) showed a woman's life rent apart by a love affair of epic intensity. Much shorter and more understated, Chekhov's short story follows two people in loveless marriages who also find themselves falling in love. After some dramatic twists and turns, their affair arrives at a stable state. At long last, the protagonist—a banker in his thirties—and his beloved, a thirtysomething housewife whose titular “dog” is, comically, a Pomeranian, admit not only that they love each other but also that they want to live together permanently.

  The earnest confession that produces this mutual admission floods the narrative with happiness and relief—as well as a sense of wonder that such a desire could have been contemplated and articulated by both parties. But by what steps...