Culture and Redemption (eBook)

Religion, the Secular, and American Literature

Tracy Fessenden (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2011
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4008-3730-4 (ISBN)

Infos

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 "e;secular"e; 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.

Autor

Tracy Fessenden is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. She is the coeditor of The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.6.2011
• Zusatzinfo: 6 line illus.
• Verlagsort: Princeton
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur
• Themenwelt: Sonstiges ► Geschenkbücher
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: abolitionism • African Americans • alfred kazin • American Anti-Slavery Society • americans • anti-catholicism • Apostasy • Baptists • Bible • Calvinism • Career • Catharine Beecher • Catholic Church • Catholicism • Charlotte Perkins Gilman • Christian • Christian culture • Christianity • Christian Right • Civilization • Clergy • collegiality • common school • congregational church • Cotton Mather • culture of the united states • deity • Edward Said • Feminism • Feminism (international relations) • freedom of religion • Freethought • Generosity • Gratitude • Great Awakening • Harriet Beecher Stowe • Henry Ward Beecher • Huckleberry Finn • hypocrisy • Iconoclasm • Ideology • Idolatry • imperialism • infidel • I Wish (manhwa) • jay gatsby • Jews • John Corrigan • King Philip's War • Leo Marx • Literacy • Literature • Lydia Maria Child • Lyman Beecher • Mark Twain • Missionary • Modernity • mormonism • mother • Mrs. • narrative • of education • Patriotism • piety • Polemic • Politics • Prejudice • Presbyterianism • Princeton University Press • Protestant culture • Protestantism • Publication • Public sphere • Puritans • Racism • Religion • Religious development • religious experience • Religious Identity • Religious Studies • rhetoric • Romanism • sacred history • Secularism • Secularization • sensibility • Sentimental Novel • separation of church and state • Sermon • Slavery • Society of Jesus • Spirituality • Suggestion • Superiority (short story) • The New England Primer • Theology • Toleration • University of California Press • war • Writing
• ISBN-10: 1-4008-3730-8 / 1400837308
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4008-3730-4 / 9781400837304