How To Use Sentimentality In A Sentence

Moreover, don't these choices facilitate a feminist reading of the text, deconstructing sentimentality to expose masculine failings and feminine rebellion?
Stray too far in one direction and you devolve into saccharine sentimentality, go the other direction and you risk crass exploitation.
I think that I avoided self-pity and sentimentality about it because I didn't feel that way about it.
The demands which Humbert makes upon Lolita, with his appalling sentimentality, cannot possibly be met by her: and the result is a bitter comedy in which the nymphet answers his passion by demand for more iced lollies or fudge sundaes. From the archive, 23 January 1959: Lolita and its critics
Your Silent Nights and Joy to the Worlds manage to be special and festive without first being coated with a cubic kilometre of sickly sentimentality.

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Being incapable of theory, being indeed incapable of thought, he can only deal in two things: what he calls practicality and what I call sentimentality. The wheels of justice grind slow…
The writers juggled a nice mix of comedy, drama and romance pretty well, only occasionally stumbling into gooey sentimentality.
How does she avoid sentimentality? Times, Sunday Times
The short Serenades are also quite pretty and Hanson makes the most out of their sugary sentimentality.
It is an old-fashioned, admirably reticent film that succeeds not through daring but by avoiding the seductions of sentimentality and melodrama.
The sentimentality, which at times reaches unbearable levels, is saccharine and cloying.
As I say, Angell resists sentimentality, but he is alive to sentiment.
Beyond sentimentality and self-indulgence, these backward glances at a naïve landscape awaken - or reawaken - the conservationist within us.
Its strong points are undermined by cloying sentimentality and whimsy. Times, Sunday Times
Amorphous plotlessness, cloying sentimentality, other things. Freedom Films with English Subtitles
It did eventually sink into a murky mire of sickening sentimentality that left me feeling nauseous, but hey, that's just me.
He has pathos without sentimentality, humour without guile and infinite sympathy. Times, Sunday Times
Shaftesbury's formulation of sentimentality as either a manifestation of latitudinarianism or deism, both vaguely secularized systems of advancing self-sufficient virtue as the means by which manners dominated and controlled behavior in the public realm. Talking About Virtue: Paisiello's 'Nina,' Paër's 'Agnese,' and the Sentimental Ethos
The book leaves the reader often stunned by his intermittent inhumanity and his incorrigible sentimentality.
Such sentimentality towards animals helped cavalry men retain their humanity.
McCarthy need not have worried, because this film is devoid of self-pity or false sentimentality.
Such sentimentality towards animals helped cavalry men retain their humanity.
Caring for animals is not sentimentality - it reinforces our respect for life.
Its rough edges and crafty urchins give it a true grit that avoids the sentimentality of its American cousins. Times, Sunday Times
He came up with a witty scenario worlds away from the sugary sentimentality of most productions of the classic ballet.
His lack of sentimentality, his preoccupation with sex, and attention to often sordid reality were attractive to a large section of Italy's growingly literate public.
He notes that he looked "to those twelve Caesars so mistreated by Suetonius," in the hope of emulating the best of each: "the clear-sightedness of Tiberius, without his harshness; the learning of Claudius without his weakness; Nero's taste for the arts, but stripped of all foolish vanity; the kindness of Titus, stopping short of his sentimentality; Vespasian's thrift, but not his absurd miserliness. Portrait of Power Embodied in a Roman Emperor
A term applied to art or artefacts characterized by vulgarity, sentimentality, and pretentious bad taste.
Only when I was outside again, in the mad helter-skelter of sound and light and asphalt, did I feel properly disgusted with my sentimentality and the way I'd laid myself open for the cameras.
That is practically what Michelet did, and though the garrulous old gossip drivelled endlessly about matters of supreme unimportance and ecstasized in his mild way over trivial anecdotes which he expanded beyond all proportion, and though his sentimentality and chauvinism sometimes discredited his quite plausible conjectures, he was nevertheless the only French historian who had overcome the limitation of time and made another age live anew before our eyes. Là-bas
The Labour Party will soon learn the value of these polite demonstrations that it is always its duty not to hamper the governing classes in their very difficult and delicate and dangerous task of safeguarding the interests of this great empire: in short, to let itself be gammoned by elegant phrases and by adroit practisings on its personal good-nature, its inveterate proletarian sentimentality, and its secret misgivings as to the correctness of its manners. New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index
During that interminable slo-mo edit of England's World Cup qualification the river of molten sentimentality was so ickily glutinous you'd have thought we'd already won the bloody thing. Frederick william jackson
There are letters from home too so we can have shots of mawkish sentimentality and tears.
Sentimentality and superficial nostrums must be avoided. Christianity Today
These last shots betray a sentimentality and patronizing attitude inherent in the film's setting.
Now, here she is confronted by Lucy's chaos and Barnaby's wishy-washy sentimentality. SEA MUSIC
But recurrent episodes of Carterism -- sentimentality about "dialogue" as the dissolver of differences, leavened by vanity about the power of one's personality -- waste time, which we are running short of. Jimmy Carter, Disappointed
The experience gives him a newfound confidence that might be mistaken for sentimentality.
The sentimentality has less to do with politics, and more with nationhood and the great family of Germany.
Its mawkish sentimentality and studied compositional restraint is typical of high Victorian genre painting shown at the Fair.
He was the first artist to depict the Highland landscape without sentimentality.
But when you pare away the sentimentality, when you realise that sumptuous as the scenery is it does not pay the mortgage, you appreciate that farming is the fulcrum of rural life, the pivot that makes everything else possible.
Now, by love I don't mean indulgence or sentimentality.
The film lacks sentimentality or heroics, and that makes Pollock as strong as its subject matter.
To Swan's credit, she deftly skirts sentimentality; there is plenty of sentiment, but no bathos.
We love the luxury of sentimentality and much prefer to avoid the weight of moral responsibility. Times, Sunday Times
The slick script contains just the right amounts of camp humour and epic sentimentality. Times, Sunday Times
But what saves it from saccharine sentimentality is that Meany is used as a means of exposing not just the hypocrisies of small town life but the larger follies of post-war America.
What this unwholesome alliance produced at the Javits Center was an unrestrained wallow in sentimentality and anti-development attitudes.
The director discovered a rich vein of sentimentality.
But it might mean that sneaking the schmaltz is no longer necessary - that we can start embracing sentimentality again without worrying whether we should change our names and move to another town. Feelin’ Groovy | PopPolitics.com
FILMS about people growing old and struggling with life usually have far too much sentimentality attached. The Sun
There are letters from home too so we can have shots of mawkish sentimentality and tears.
Sentimentality always cloaks brutality, as Jung once wisely observed, and wolves in sheep's clothing are always ready for the big chance.
By deliberately adopting the stylistics of sentimentality in his screenplay, Cameron recalls yet another, less cynical time in Titanic.
The stories range from the heart-warming to the bone chilling, without ever giving in to sentimentality or farce.
He was the first artist to depict the Highland landscape without sentimentality.
I don't go for over-much sentimentality when the animals I've loved have reached the end of their journey.
My stepsister eats from her flock all the time, or did when I last checked, and other farmers of my acquaintance display no iota of sentimentality about their animals.
I wish people would stop mistaking sentimentality for serious emotion.
This utopian sentiment, patently present in the banausic sentimentality of lyrics in popular music, combines with the notion of uniform moral space to render the specificity of religious and political roles opaque.
Speaking personally, I find Christmas specials in general too sweet and saccharine for my taste, and there is plenty of that gooey sentimentality.
Culture or civilization in a degraded state of sentimentality and vulgarity.
This is a show that, despite its bygone English rural setting, is without nostalgia or sentimentality.
With Cancer being a water sign, people often assume that slushy sentimentality takes precedence over sex in their lives.
And try as they might, the charm of the leads can't hide the lack of coherence or overbearing sentimentality. The Sun
Its strong points are undermined by cloying sentimentality and whimsy. Times, Sunday Times
The gentle songs lack appropriate melodic sweetness and lyrical sentimentality.
Hawley achieves the difficult task of walking the tightrope between sweet and sickly sweet, between sentiment and sentimentality.
Life today is guided not by logic and reason but rather by emotion, fear and sentimentality.
But even when these songs have heart-rending subject matter, there's usually something uplifting near the surface, delivered without schmaltz or gushing sentimentality.
A mawkish sentimentality appeared, just as it did after the death of Diana. Times, Sunday Times
And try as they might, the charm of the leads can't hide the lack of coherence or overbearing sentimentality. The Sun
It is a high-wire act of comic absurdity with a safety net of sentimentality.
Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality. Camille Paglia, still a big Obama supporter, loves Sarah and Todd as "powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism."
That the nostalgic bent can lapse into cloying sentimentality is obvious.
But what I have just attempted very briefly to articulate is not mere sentimentality.
This essay will examine how sentimentality and its valorization of virtue spread through one particular intersection of opera and literature; that is, the seduced maiden narrative is enacted in these operas, once as a comedy of sorts, once as a tragedy. Talking About Virtue: Paisiello's 'Nina,' Paër's 'Agnese,' and the Sentimental Ethos
It used to be a common practice in the country, in sending marriages to the press, to tack on a bit of poetry in the shape of some sweet hymenial sentimentality. Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 Devoted to Literature and National Policy
Sentimentality, blazing country, bluegrass and jaw-dropping performance make this an essential album.
There isn't much dewy-eyed sentimentality about nature in the Powder River Basin.
And if practicality is your wont rather than sentimentality, you should still go.
I like it when old farts like Kristof remind people that wallowing in sentimentality with Little Lord Fauntleroy is just as fun today as it was back when it was written. Speaking as one old fart to another
The episode achieves its emotional effect without sentimentality and with intellectual integrity.
The great Irish writer James Joyce said that sentimentality is unearned emotion. Lovecraft Paragraphs : The Lovecraft News Network
The danger here is that emotion and sentimentality are likely to get in the way of common sense and reality.
Its strong points are undermined by cloying sentimentality and whimsy. Times, Sunday Times
An astute mixture of laughter and tears, the screenplay constantly pulls back from the edge of outright sentimentality with a sarcastic one-liner or a cheeky remark.
He talked about his homeland with all the sentimentality of an expatriate.
Instead, the show walked a tightrope between sentiment and sentimentality. Times, Sunday Times
There isn't a whole lot of gooey sentimentality and no symbolic Robert Frost poems.
But the detective is not driven by either sentimentality or morbid curiosity. Times, Sunday Times
And thus what slopwork, what toymakers ', ironmongers' stuff it all was! of a prettiness fit to make you cry, a silly sentimentality fit to make your heart turn with disgust! The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, Volume 5
Here is architecture, rather than sloppy sentimentality or crass commercialism.
But the detective is not driven by either sentimentality or morbid curiosity. Times, Sunday Times
Despite this anti-modernist sentimentality, from the 1930s to the 1950s Jaques's enormous popularity could not be wholly ignored by highbrow tastemakers.
All this loss - of innocence, of dearly loved creatures - and yet, there is not a word of sentimentality or taste of treacle.
The kind of Family of Man photography that promotes an upbeat ‘love conquers all’ sentimentality Sontag finds morally reprehensible in its naivety.
I think I'm about to go through a period where random moments of sentimentality will be the triggers for massive outpourings.
Still, there's nothing especially new in the themes or the feelings expressed, and Mr. Gordon's edgeless music goes for surface prettiness and sentimentality instead of grit. An Artifact of Indulgence From Bernard Herrmann
And if practicality is your wont rather than sentimentality, you should still go.
Sentimentality seems a characteristic of all the writers of that period.
But when poorly understood or practiced, the language of ‘hospitality’ also can tempt us to distortions and corruptions that generate sentimentality or cynicism.
Equally irksome, however, is the trend for outpourings of cloying sentimentality that deface the personal columns at this time of year.
Rigorously avoiding sentimentality, Jacobson opts instead for something far more uplifting, which is honesty.
She works hard to avoid sentimentality. Times, Sunday Times
Shaftesbury's role in defining Sentimentality as "the affective spectacle of benign generosity" (211), as well as its contested religious origins in latitudinarianism and Notes on 'Talking About Virtue: Paisiello's 'Nina,' Paër's 'Agnese,' and the Sentimental Ethos'
This my swashbuckler misnames sentimentality -- and thus I feel that he always tends to admire the wrong qualities, because he condones even what he calls sentimentality in one whom he chooses to admire. The Silent Isle
The charm and winning portrayal cannot support the weight of predictability, unrealism, and faux sentimentality.
Its strong points are undermined by cloying sentimentality and whimsy. Times, Sunday Times
There's a pathos in his performance which he never lets slide into sentimentality.
The underlying science is clearly explained and three case studies are followed compellingly yet without sentimentality. Times, Sunday Times
Behind all its smug hypocrisy and sickly sentimentality are the sinister outlines of the class war.
Derided for his sentimentality and the mechanical precision of his work, his standing has gradually declined.
Love is often a victim of its stubbornness, sentimentality, irrationality and absurdity. Dr T.P.Chia
But, as a former war reporter myself, I recoil from the mawkish sentimentality with which we enshrine our casualties.
This is a show that, despite its bygone English rural setting, is without nostalgia or sentimentality.
The death of a footballer is too often used as an excuse by the media and excessively emotional fans for an outbreak of mawkish sentimentality.
The show was designed specifically to appeal to other African-American teens, and while it was amiable enough entertainment it suffered from a sugary cuteness and too much sentimentality.
He has been praised for the strength and command of his early and late nature poetry, for his ability to animate a landscape free of any romanticized sentimentality, and for the scope of his mythic enterprise.
JM Barrie's story is a charming weepy that keeps sentimentality at bay.
Yet none of that prevented the rest of the country from indulging in a huge celebration of royalism and rampant sentimentality.
Yet there was a valid point in its criticism of ‘the mawkish sentimentality of a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood’.
The self-satisfaction and smugness of the text is toe-curling and its frequent sickening doses of sentimentality are like being forced-fed chopped liver with chicken fat.
Valentine's Day is no longer only about syrupy sentimentality.
The movie seems to tap into a general sentimentality about animals.
Wardle suggests that it was compelling but marred by sickly sentimentality, and also proposes that Hazlitt might even have been anticipating some of the experiments in chronology made by later novelists. William hazlitt | the man of letters « poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground
When she left the city, he dispatched ridiculously "spoony" telegrams to her in Baltimore, and in his daily letters indulged in a maudlin sentimentality that might have inspired the envy of a sighing Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations The Veil Lifted, and Light Thrown on Crime and its Causes, and Criminals and their Haunts. Facts and Disclosures.
It is the perfect blend of comedy and drama, carefully treading the fine line between sentimentality and humour so that it never becomes too schmaltzy or too dreary.
Writing about this without descending into slushy sentimentality would seem impossible, but Eggers manages it.
But the scene avoids sentimentality also because we know it is bubbling up from deep personal sorrow.
Such feelings infuse Ekhrajiha, which is nonetheless an odd mix of slapstick humour and mawkish sentimentality.
This is a refreshing development, given that modern theatre is all too often marked by self-indulgence and mawkish sentimentality.
Funny how sentimentality and selective amnesia go together sometimes. Times, Sunday Times
Shelley's use of the poetics of spice in canto viii of Queen Mab and the 'Fragment of an Unfinished Drama' is an example of the poetry of ornamentation and sentimentality which spawned Ecotopia, and an acknowledgement that commercial capitalism has its metonymic flows as well. _Queen Mab_ as Topological Repertoire
Life today is guided not by logic and reason but rather by emotion, fear and sentimentality.
Jane was no beauty, always delving into some novel of gross sentimentality, and her conversational skills were disgustingly average.
Like the ring of the bell there is an authentic note which differentiates these sentiments from emotionalism or sentimentality.
However, in the half of the cabaletta in the second act that is practically always axed, he emerges as someone who pits himself against harmonisation and sentimentality.
Much more than maudlin sentimentality was involved in the effusive tributes.
To avoid sentimentality and melodrama in a film about bereavement is admirable; to avoid drama altogether seems self-defeating. Times, Sunday Times
Alice Davis Menken stood at the forefront of what her New York Times obituary calls “the evolution of penology from an attitude of sentimentality and punishment to the broader conception of mercy and rehabilitation.” Alice Davis Menken.
There is a fine line between Scouse wit and sentimentality, and Peel had crossed it.
I really don't understand the maudlin sentimentality that accompanies any discussion of these events.
Jules Furthman's script (based on a John Monk Saunders story) is devoid of melodrama or sentimentality.
He was the first artist to depict the Highland landscape without sentimentality.
There is no sentimentality about his description of those days.
Apart from its balletic set-pieces of gunfights, the film ran a gauntlet of emotions from violent excitement to melodramatics to softhearted sentimentality.
I wish people would stop mistaking sentimentality for serious emotion.
The movie seems to tap into a general sentimentality about animals.
Rankine strips her subject of all sentimentality, denaturalizing the notion of familial, ‘unslakable resemblance.’
compassion's part that leads the up - holders of capital punishment to accuse the abolitionists of sentimentality in being more sorry for the murderer than for his victim. ...
In her endeavors to rekindle a long dead flame, she now used Nikolas to stroke his sentimentality.
Her experience works well for the film, as her rendering of the gritty harbour town anchors it in a sense of reality, avoiding overly mawkish sentimentality.
Then it seemed to me one entered a long patch of really bad writing [with] redundant adjectives, a kind of facetiousness, a terrible prolixity in the dialogue of such characters as the Nurse and Prunesquallor, and sentimentality too in the case of Eda [sic] and to some extent in Titus’s sister. Weird Factoid of the Day
It contains strong elements of sentimentality and a longing for the past.
I think all my books are embarrassingly awash with sentimentality and emotion.
Funny how sentimentality and selective amnesia go together sometimes. Times, Sunday Times
So in a fit of sentimentality and with the keen realization that the guy still has a couple hundred grand that you haven't touched him for yet, you name your first born after it.
Brooks Bruzzese perfectly delineated the sentimentality of Holst's Air and brought high spirited pulse to the suite's concluding Dance.
The Redskins and Orioles have been ruined by the blights of modern sports: unsentimentality, overreliance on free agents, and obnoxious rich owners.
an intolerable degree of sentimentality
Also "Briefly Noted" by The New Yorker: "Purging the immigrant novel of all swagger and sentimentality, TÃ³ibÃn leaves us with a renewed understanding that to emigrate is to become a foreigner in two places at once. Omni Daily News
It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. Swann's Way
But the detective is not driven by either sentimentality or morbid curiosity. Times, Sunday Times
There is no dewy-eyed romanticism, no sentimentality though plenty of sentiment.
Aside from some needlessly sappy sentimentality and a cute quirkiness to characters that sometimes seems a little too pat, the film is well written.
Imbued with tenderness and earthy humour, the film never crosses the line between sensitivity and mawkish sentimentality, and the action sequences, particularly with the whales, are deftly staged.
I support you for the comments you made, and am glad you haven't retracted your views on the sickly sentimentality which is demeaning and undermining the true Britishness of our country.
The director lights up the screen with genuine emotions, minus sentimentality.
To avoid sentimentality and melodrama in a film about bereavement is admirable; to avoid drama altogether seems self-defeating. Times, Sunday Times
Here is the pretty official groveling in sentimentality.
In these novels of great emotional intensity, sensibility and sentimentality lead to virtue.
There is no sentimentality in his sympathy for his characters.
There were ballads to make the heart beat fast, and one little tragedy, _The Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, which, though not over-disposed to what he called sentimentality, I could not read without tears. Stories of Authors, British and American
To avoid sentimentality and melodrama in a film about bereavement is admirable; to avoid drama altogether seems self-defeating. Times, Sunday Times
I think all my books are embarrassingly awash with sentimentality and emotion.
In summing up her career, this icon of cerebral West Coast songcraft has produced a substantial body of work without one iota of sentimentality.
As the Cut Off was the first venue I fished for zander it will always have a special appeal, but sentimentality aside, it is well worth a visit.
His descriptive passages are often a rhapsodic rush to the edge of sentimentality, only undercut in the final moment by a shift in tone.
There was a maudlin, missish, namby-pamby sentimentality about them which disgusted her. The Last Chronicle of Barset
a tinseled charm and unabashed sentimentality
The soundtrack is the saving grace of a film that doesn't cut it in any other direction and often gets irritatingly full of boyish rudery and sentimentality. Evening Standard - Home
His one wish is for their story to be told free of embellishment and false sentimentality.
Joking about the troubles of parenthood is how we share its exquisite joys without lapsing into maudlin sentimentality.
Carl Jung said that sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality. Lovecraft Paragraphs : The Lovecraft News Network
No pods being immediately in evidence, we suspect it was a more run-of-the-mill form of mawkish, voter-confidence-reducing sentimentality disguised as comradely goodwill.
The remainder of the verses -- with which the suburban sopranos will doubtless break the serenity of the suburban nights this summer -- were of a "sloppy" sentimentality combined with a kind of hypersexual idiocy unparalleled except in an English ballad of the popular order. Over the Fireside with Silent Friends
Public displays of emotion were, he argued, a ‘symptom of a fragmented society that has exchanged reason for emotion, action for gesture, cool reserve for mawkish sentimentality’.
These moments are entirely free from sentimentality. Times, Sunday Times
His poetry often lapses into sentimentality.
In speech, the old-time 'shellback' was notoriously reticent -- almost inarticulate; but in song he found self-expression, and all the romance and poetry of the sea are breathed into his shanties, where simple childlike sentimentality alternates with the Rabelaisian humour of the grown man. The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties
He has great sensitivity and understanding but no sentimentality.
`All I'm suggesting is that we keep the debate to practicalities, and steer clear of sentimentality. PROSPECT HILL
Nonetheless they showed Andersen a way to write stories with unhappy endings while avoiding the sentimentality and melodrama that plague his novels.
Unfortunately, it seems as if he has a compulsion to negate those brilliant pieces by introducing ill advised mushy sentimentality.
There his mechanical and appallingly ill-informed Bach playing was exceeded only by the sugary sentimentality of his own, nouveau impressionist music.
Made during the Second World War, it’s packed with jingoistic Americanism, but this ties in with Cohan’s own attitudes and the unself-conscious sentimentality of his songs, and Cagney’s stiff-backed hoofing is so spirited that the moldly plot turns hardly bother one. 2009 July 04 « One-Minute Book Reviews
I have long thought that Levine's negations and denials were in fact forms of affirmation and acceptance, ways of warding off sentimentality and bad faith.
He trod a pretty thin line, of course, because there's always a danger that such well-meaning words can end up sounding like soapy sentimentality, but he managed to keep himself on the right side.

How To Use Sentimentality In A Sentence

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