Culture and redemption : religion, the secular, and American literature / Tracy Fessenden.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fessenden.

Contributor:

Tracy..

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Secularism--United States.

Secularism.

Christianity and culture--United States.

Christianity and culture.

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Religion and literature--United States.

Religion and literature.

United States--Church history.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (349 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere. Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One. Protestantism and the Social Space of Reading

CHAPTER ONE. Legible Dominion: Puritanism's New World Narrative

CHAPTER TWO. Protestant Expansion, Indian Violence, and Childhood Death: The New England Primer

CHAPTER THREE. From Disestablishment to "Consensus": The Nineteenth-Century Bible Wars and the Limits of Dissent

CHAPTER FOUR. Conversion to Democracy: Religion and the American Renaissance

PART TWO: Secular Fictions

CHAPTER FIVE. From Romanism to Race: Uncle Tom's Cabin

CHAPTER SIX Mark Twain and the Ambivalent Refuge of Unbelief

CHAPTER SEVEN. Secularism, Feminism, Imperialism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Progress Narrative of U.S. Feminism

CHAPTER EIGHT. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Catholic Closet

AFTERWORD. American Religion and the Future of Dissent

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-321) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9786613137449

9781400837304

1400837308

9781283137447

1283137445

OCLC:

731646854