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Culture and Redemption : Religion, the Secular, and American Literature / Tracy Fessenden.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2011]Copyright date: ©2006Edition: Course BookDescription: 1 online resource (352 p.) : 6 line illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691049649
  • 9781400837304
Subject(s): Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
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
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.

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

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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.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Jul 2021)