See especially "No More Separate Spheres," a special issue of American Literature (September 1998; published with additional essays as No More Separate Spheres [Duke U P, 2002]).
Armstrong, Nancy. "The Rise of the Domestic Woman." Rpt. in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction : A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press 1989, 1987.
Bauermeister, Erica R. "The Lamplighter, The Wide, Wide World, and Hope Leslie: Reconsidering the Recipes for Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels." Legacy 8.1 (Spring 1991): 17-28.
Baym, Nina. "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors." American Quarterly (1981); rpt. in Feminism and American Literary History. New Brunswick, N. J. : Rutgers U P, 1992. 3-18. PS152.B39 1992
Baym, Nina. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. [If you read this, also read Machor's response in Readers in History.]
Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Bergman, Jill, and Debra Bernardi, eds.Our Sisters' Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.
Boudreau, Kristin. Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses.Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2002.
Brodhead, Richard. "Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America." Representations 21 (1988): 67-96; rpt. in Cultures of Letters. PS201.B68 1993
Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. PS374.D57B7 1990
Brown, Herbert Ross. The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. PS377.B7
Buell, Lawrence. "Circling the Spheres: A Dialogue." American Literature 70 (1998): 465-490.
Burgett, Bruce. Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1998.
Campbell, Donna M. "Sentimental Conventions and Self-Protection: Little Women and the Wide, Wide World." Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 11.2 (1994): 118-29. Print.
Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Chapman, Mary, and Glenn Hendler, eds. Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.
Chandler, Marilyn R. Dwelling in the Text : Houses in American Fiction. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1991.
Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1991.
Cogan, Frances B. All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.
Cott, Nancy. The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven: Yale U P, 1977.
Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business: American Woman Writers in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. PS147.C68 1990
Cutter, Martha J. Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women's Writing, 1850-1930. Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 1999. PS374.F45C87 1999
Davidson, Cathy N. Reading in America : Literature & Social History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Z1003.2.R424 1989
Dobson, Joanne. "The American Renaissance Reenvisioned." in The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Ed. Joyce W. Warren. New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers UP, 1993. 164-82. PS147.O85 1993
Dobson, Joanne. "Reclaiming Sentimental Literature." American Literature 69 (1997): 263-288.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
Elbert, Monika M., ed. and introd., ed. Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2000. PS169.G45 S47 2000
Fetterley, Judith. "Commentary: 19th Century American Women Writers and the Politics of Recovery." American Literary History 6.3 (Fall 1994): 600-11.
Fetterley, Judith. Introduction to Provisions: A Reader from Nineteenth-Century American Women.
Fetterley, Judith. "'My Sister! My Sister!': The Rhetoric of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie." American Literature 70 (1998): 491-516.
Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader : A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford U P, 1987. PS377.F55 1987
Goshgarian, G. M. To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: Study of Middle Class Culture in America, 1830-70. Yale U.P., 1986.
Handley, William R. Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American West. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2002. PS271 .H29 2002
Harris, Susan K.. "'But is it any good?': Evaluating Nineteenth-Century American Women's Fiction." American Literature 63 (March 1991): 42-61.
Harris, Susan K. 19th-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. PS374.W6H37 1990
Hendler, Glenn. "The Limits of Sympathy: Louisa May Alcott and the Sentimental Novel." American Literary History 3 (Winter 1991): 685-706.
Hoeller, Hildegard. Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction. UP of Florida Gainesville, FL, 2000. PS3545.H16Z664 2000
Howard, June. Publishing the Family. Duke UP Durham, NC, 2001. (Ch. 5 is an expanded version of "What is Sentimentality?")
Howard, June. "What is Sentimentality?" American Literary History 11.1 (Spring 1999): 62-81.
Kaplan, Amy. "Manifest Domesticity." American Literature 70 (1998): 581-606. Also in Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease. Cultures of United States Imperialism. New Americanists. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.E179.5.C96 1993
Kelley, Mary. "The Sentimentalists: Promise and Betrayal in the Home." Signs 4.3 (Spring 1979): 434-446.
Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Kerber, Linda K. "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History." No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader. Eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher. Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 29-65.
Kilcup, Karen L. Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998.
Lauter, Paul. Canons and Contexts. New York: Oxford U P, 1991.
Machor, James L. "Historical Hermeneutics and Antebellum Fiction: Gender, Response Theory, and Interpretive Contexts." Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1993. 54-84.
Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham: Duke U P, 2000. HQ1418 .M47 2000
Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000. PS147 .N63 2000
Papashvily, Helen Waite. All the Happy Endings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women Who Wrote it, the Women Who Read it, in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Harper, 1956.
Park, You-Me, and Gayle Wald. "Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres." No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader. Eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher. Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. 263-87.
Penner, Louise. "Domesticity and Self-Possession in The Morgesons and Jane Eyre." Studies in American Fiction 27.2 (1999): 131-47.
Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Domesticity and its Critics in the Antebellum United States. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. PS374.D57R64 1997
Romero, Lora. "Domesticity and Fiction." The Columbia History of the American Novel. Eds. Elliott, Emory, et al. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. xviii, 905 pp. Print.
Romines, Ann. The Home Plot: Women, Writing, and Domestic Ritual. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. PS374.D57R66 1992
Samuels, Shirley, ed. The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America. New York : Oxford University Press, 1992. PS 217 S55 C85 1992
Shamir, Milette. "Divided Plots: Interior Space and Gender Difference in Domestic Fiction." Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 29.4 (1996): 429-72.
Showalter, Elaine. Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991. PS147.S48 1994
Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century. New York : Oxford University Press, 1992. PS374.D57T38 1992
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. "Crippled Girls and Lame Old Women: Sentimental Spectacles of Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing." Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup: Blackwell, Malden, MA, 1998. 251. PS 217 .W64 N57 1998
Todd, Janet M. Sensibility: An Introduction. London and New York: Methuen, 1986.
Tompkins, Jane P. "The Other American Renaissance." The American Renaissance Reconsidered. Ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease(ed. & introd.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. 34-57.
Tompkins, Jane. Afterword. The Wide, Wide World. 1850. New York: Feminist Press, 1987.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. PS374.S7T66 1986
Tracey, Karen. Plots and Proposals: American Women's Fiction, 1850-90. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Warren, Joyce W., ed. The (Other) American Tradition: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.
Welter, Barbara. "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860." American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151-174. [Note: If you read Welter, be sure to read also Mary Kelley's essay "Commentary on Barbara Welter" in Lucy Maddox's Locating American Studies : The Evolution of a Discipline. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999 and Frances B. Cogan's All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America.]
Wexler, Laura. "Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform." Samuels 9-38.
Wexler, Laura, and Werner Sollors. "Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye." American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader. Eds. Michael A. Elliott and Claudia Stokes: New York UP, New York, NY, 2003. vii, 349.
Warhol, Robyn R. Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2003.
Zboray, Ronald J. A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.