Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Newman, Andrew | Scheckel, Susan | Robinson, Benedict | Reynolds, David.
Date
2014-12-01
Keywords
American literature
Department
Department of English.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77590
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
This dissertation explores how the concept of religious enthusiasm shaped American literature and culture from the Revolution through the Civil War. It traces a new narrative of the relation between literature, religion, and public life in this crucial moment of national formation, as languages and narratives of enthusiasm proliferated across a variety of sites and discourses. The ongoing confrontation between the legacy of Enlightenment and a culture being transformed by the experience of revolution and religious revivalism demanded reconsideration of previous conceptions of normative religious experience and the construction of civil society. In the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, I show how the intellectual roots and popular manifestations of the concept of religious enthusiasm that circulated in the Atlantic world impacted American literature, and were in turn reimagined and reshaped by that literature. Through an examination of Enlightenment historiography, romantic philosophy, movements of reform and revivalism, and their interaction with the developing literary culture of the new nation, I argue that enthusiasm was an important--if often controversial and ambiguous--concept that contributed to nineteenth-century conceptions of the relationship between religion, literature, and an emerging American public sphere. | 238 pages
Recommended Citation
Zellner, Lawrence, "" The Vortex of Enthusiasm" : Religion and the Making of American Literature" (2014). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3390.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3390