Sentimentalism in literature refers to techniques a writer employs to induce a tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation at hand[2] (and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments).
"[4] In James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sends Buck Mulligan a telegram that reads "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.
"[5] James Baldwin considered that "Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel...the mask of cruelty".
[11] Moral philosophers saw sentimentality as a cure for social isolation;[12] and Adam Smith indeed considered that "the poets and romance writers, who best paint...domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno"[13] and the Stoics.
[24] In a "subjective confession" of 1932, Ulysses: a Monologue, the analytic psychologist Carl Jung anticipates Baudrillard when he writes: "Think of the lamentable role of popular sentiment in wartime!
[Carl Jung: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 143] Complications enter into the ordinary view of sentimentality, however, when changes in fashion and setting— the "climate of thought"[25]—intrude between the work and the reader.
"[28] 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".