[D]efinitions of sentiment that equate it with emotion, as opposed to reason, will not take us very far. Although criticism has paid far less attention to the affective than to the intellectual dimensions of reading, our responses to literature are always emotional. So are our responses to music, to advertisements, to newspaper stories and political speeches. Since these emotions are themselves mediated by language and culture, the observation that sentiments are conventionalized, socially organized emotions cannot be a ground for dismissing them as inauthentic. These are common views, in both everyday speech and scholarship, but they derive from a map of the mind in which emotion preexists thought and remains separate from it, rather than being intricately and indispensably part of culture. They also neglect the specific history of the sentimental.

This is an excerpt from June Howard’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 214).