Search Results

Picks up the story of conversion narrative among evangelical Anglicans through a close reading of three case studies. Associated with the town of Olney, John Newton, William Cowper, and Thomas Scott lived near one another in the north-eastern corner of Buckinghamshire, where Newton and Scott were clergymen in the Church of England, and Cowper was a local gentleman-poet living on patronage. Like most evangelical Anglicans, they were moderate Calvinists when they wrote their narratives in the 1760s and 1770s, and the Calvinistic order of salvation provided a model for their self-understanding. However, in their autobiographies we find a vivid display of personality that appears not despite the presence of a model, but because of it. Within a similar theological framework, Newton interpreted his life typologically, Scott intellectually, and Cowper psychologically—each offering a unique expression of personal adherence to a common gospel.

This chapter presents Amazing Grace (How Sweet the Sound), a hymn composed by John Newton. Known for his preaching, Newton also devoted considerable time to writing hymns. His sermons often originated from the lyrics of his hymns. In 1767, Newton collaborated with his friend William Cowper for a collection of hymns that would eventually be published as Olney Hymns two years later. In “Faith's Review and Expectation,” also known as “Amazing Grace,” he expressed his overwhelming joy for divine grace. The hymn begins with a reference to 1 Chronicles 17:16-7, which describes King David's ecstatic response to the Prophet Nathan's announcement that God promised to establish an eternal kingdom from his line.

This chapter explores how and why narratives of the abolitionist John Newton evolved within the Cowper and Newton Museum between the centenary of his death in 1907 and the bicentenary in 2007. Using discourse and exhibition analysis, it seeks to understand how changing discourses surrounding the memory of Newton and the wider representation of slavery affected how abolition is narrated in the museum. In doing so, it examines the complex relationship between local and global narratives of abolition and slavery.

Chapter 3 investigates ways of figuring the author’s doubled body, physical and textual, through clothing. It contrasts the ways that male and female authorial clothing has been imagined and displayed within the writer’s house museum to animate ideas of the author. It discusses, inter alia, Dorothy Wordsworth’s shoes, William Cowper’s nightcap, Henrik Ibsen’s top-hat, Elizabeth Gaskell’s shawl, Charlotte Brontë’s wedding-bonnet, and Emily Dickinson’s white dress. It argues that the display of clothing within the writer’s museum converts writing into biography. In this common museum trope, clothing is seen to take and preserve the most intimate and truthful form of its wearer, and to survive as witness to it. Clothing displaces the intimacy and truth of writing; text is converted into textile.

Beneath the gently rolling, seemingly mundane topography that characterizes the shortgrass steppe is a complex mosaic of soils. Many of these soils are superimposed upon older, buried soils that formed in other millennia under different climatic regimes. The nature of this soil mosaic reveals much about the past and dictates much about the future of the shortgrass steppe. There is considerable heterogeneity among soils of the shortgrass steppe, yet they maintain a high degree of homogeneity when contrasted with soils of other ecosystems. The driving forces that make these soils alike are a semiarid climate and a resilient plant community ( P ielke and Doesken, chapter 2, this volume; and Lauenroth, chapter 5, this volume). The combined effects of vegetation and climate on soil development yield generally predictable results. Shortgrass steppe soils are characterized by the accumulation of organic matter in the surface (0–20 cm). Approximately 60% of the graminoid root mass resides in the - rst 10 cm of mineral soil (Schimel et al., 1986); 90% is contained in the surface 20 cm (Schimel et al., 1985). Surface horizons typically are darker hued than underlying horizons and have organic carbon contents that average 1% to 3% (Yonker et al., 1988). Shortgrass steppe soils maintain a high-percent base saturation (and high pH) because of low leaching and weathering potentials that result from semiarid conditions. Zones of secondary calcium carbonate accumulation are common in subsurface horizons and may appear as threads, seams, or nodules (Blecker et al., 1997). In addition, these soils are characterized by zones of secondary clay accumulation in subsurface horizons; clay accumulations are a result of either the in situ weathering of primary minerals or the translocation of clay minerals leached from the surface horizon. In either case, the maximum depth of accumulation gives some indication of the time-averaged depth of the wetting front in the soil pro- le (Blecker et al., 1997). The factors that produce considerable heterogeneity among the soils of the shortgrass steppe are related to parent material, the age of the soil, and the subtleties of topography. These factors vary at a - ner scale than either vegetation or climate.