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Cover of Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion

Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion Lived Theologies and Literature

  • Published: 6 May 2016
  • DOI: 10.4324/9781315598321
  • Print ISBN: 9781472410429
  • eBook ISBN: 9781315598321

Nineteenth-century American women’s culture was immersed in religious experience and female authors of the era employed representations of faith to various cultural ends. Focusing primarily on non-canonical texts, this collection explores the diversity of religious discourse in nineteenth-century women’s literature. The contributors examine fiction, political writings, poetry, and memoirs by professional authors, social activists, and women of faith, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet E. Wilson, Sarah Piatt, Julia Ward Howe, Julia A. J. Foote, Lucy Mack Smith, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Fanny Newell. Embracing the complexities of lived religion in women’s culture-both its repressive and its revolutionary potential-Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion articulates how American women writers adopted the language of religious sentiment for their own cultural, political, or spiritual ends.

Contents

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    Front Matter
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    Introduction By Mary McCartin Wearn
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    1
    Renegade Religious: Performativity, Female Identity, and the Antebellum Convent-Escape Narrative By Nancy F. Sweet
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    2
    Shaping Narrative: Julia A. J. Foote’s Theology of Holiness By Joy A. J. Howard
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    3
    Composing Radical Lives: Women as Autonomous Religious Seekers and Nineteenth-Century Memoirs By Rachel Cope
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    4
    “Come Right Down With Me”: Poverty, Agency, and Incarnational Reading in the Work of Rebecca Harding Davis By Benjamin G. Sammons
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    5
    Religious Popular Culture and the Critique of Romantic Racialism in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig By Randi Lynn Tanglen
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    6
    “One [Hermaphroditic] Angel”: Swedenborg, Gender Complementarity, and Divine Love in Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite 1 By Karlyn Crowley
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    7
    “The grace of god Assisting”: Abolitionist Women and the Politics of Religion By Valerie D. Levy
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    8
    “A Religion of Their Own”: Louisa May Alcott’s New American Religion By Gregory Eiselein
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    9
    “A startling reform”: Women and Christianity in the Work of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps By Roxanne Harde
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    10
    The Puritan Roots of Sarah Piatt’s Feminist Materialism By Mary McCartin Weam
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    Back Matter