Microloans and micronarratives: Sentiment for a small world

This essay evaluates the contribution that sentimentality might make to cosmopolitan practices in contemporary life. In particular, it considers how the legacy of feminized sentimental fiction informs twenty-first-century rhetoric on the Internet. The essay examines how the person-to-person microlending Web site Kiva fosters attachments with distant others through the illusion of intimacy that reshapes the global into an emotionally manageable size. This sentimental promise of a small world is both what enables and what haunts a cosmopolitan sense of responsibility to others.