Saskia Lettmaier
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199569977
- eISBN:
- 9780191722066
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199569977.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Legal History
While common law actions for breach of promise of marriage originated in the mid-seventeenth century, it was not until the ‘long nineteenth century’ that they saw their rise to prominence and their ...
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While common law actions for breach of promise of marriage originated in the mid-seventeenth century, it was not until the ‘long nineteenth century’ that they saw their rise to prominence and their subsequent fall from favour. This monograph ties the story of the action's rise and fall between 1800 and 1940 to changes in the prevalent conception of woman, her ideal role in society, sexual relations, and the family, arguing that the idiosyncratic nineteenth-century breach-of-promise suit (a luxuriant blend of both contract and tort) and Victorian notions of ideal femininity were uneasily and fatally, but nonetheless inextricably, entwined. It classifies the ninteenth-century breach-of-promise action as a ‘codification’ of the contemporaneous ideal of true womanhood and explores the longer-term implications of this infusion of mythologized femininity for the law, in particular for the position of plaintiffs. Surveying three consecutive time periods – the early nineteenth century, the high Victorian, and the post-Victorian periods – and adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines the perspectives of legal history, social history, and literary analysis, it argues that the feminizing process, by shaping a cause of action in accordance with an ideal at odds with the very notion of women going to law, imported a fatal structural inconsistency that at first remained obscured, but ultimately vulgarized and undid the cause of action. Alongside more than two hundred and fifty real-life breach-of-promise cases, the book examines literary and cinematic renditions of the breach-of-promise theme, by artists ranging from Charles Dickens to P. G. Wodehouse, in order to expose the subtle yet unmistakable ways in which what happened (and what changed) in the breach-of-promise courtroom influenced the changing representation of the breach-of-promise plaintiff in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and film.Less
While common law actions for breach of promise of marriage originated in the mid-seventeenth century, it was not until the ‘long nineteenth century’ that they saw their rise to prominence and their subsequent fall from favour. This monograph ties the story of the action's rise and fall between 1800 and 1940 to changes in the prevalent conception of woman, her ideal role in society, sexual relations, and the family, arguing that the idiosyncratic nineteenth-century breach-of-promise suit (a luxuriant blend of both contract and tort) and Victorian notions of ideal femininity were uneasily and fatally, but nonetheless inextricably, entwined. It classifies the ninteenth-century breach-of-promise action as a ‘codification’ of the contemporaneous ideal of true womanhood and explores the longer-term implications of this infusion of mythologized femininity for the law, in particular for the position of plaintiffs. Surveying three consecutive time periods – the early nineteenth century, the high Victorian, and the post-Victorian periods – and adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines the perspectives of legal history, social history, and literary analysis, it argues that the feminizing process, by shaping a cause of action in accordance with an ideal at odds with the very notion of women going to law, imported a fatal structural inconsistency that at first remained obscured, but ultimately vulgarized and undid the cause of action. Alongside more than two hundred and fifty real-life breach-of-promise cases, the book examines literary and cinematic renditions of the breach-of-promise theme, by artists ranging from Charles Dickens to P. G. Wodehouse, in order to expose the subtle yet unmistakable ways in which what happened (and what changed) in the breach-of-promise courtroom influenced the changing representation of the breach-of-promise plaintiff in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and film.
Constanze Guthenke
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199231850
- eISBN:
- 9780191716188
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199231850.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, European History: BCE to 500CE
This book offers a fresh look at one of the most tenacious features of Romantic Hellenism: its fascination with modern Greece as material and ideal alike. It suggests that literary representations of ...
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This book offers a fresh look at one of the most tenacious features of Romantic Hellenism: its fascination with modern Greece as material and ideal alike. It suggests that literary representations of modern Greece, by both foreign and Greek writers, run on notions of a significant landscape. Landscape, as a critical term, is itself the product of the period when Greece assumed increasing importance as a territorial, political and modern entity. The implied authority of nature, in turn, follows its own dynamic and highly ambivalent logic of representation. Greece operated as a material symbol, one that shared the brittle structure of the Romantic image. To explicate this enabling structure this study draws on the critical writings of Herder, Schiller and the early Romantics, while grounding mainly German philhellenic writing in its cultural and political context. Main authors discussed are Friedrich Hölderlin and Wilhelm Müller, but also the first generation of Greek writers in the new nation state after 1821: Alexandros Rizos Rangavis, Panagiotis Soutsos, Andreas Kalvos and Dionysios Solomos. To enlist authors challenged to write from within the place of Greece allows not only a new take on the problematic imagery of Greece, but also gives a new dimension to the study of Hellenism as a trans-national movement.Less
This book offers a fresh look at one of the most tenacious features of Romantic Hellenism: its fascination with modern Greece as material and ideal alike. It suggests that literary representations of modern Greece, by both foreign and Greek writers, run on notions of a significant landscape. Landscape, as a critical term, is itself the product of the period when Greece assumed increasing importance as a territorial, political and modern entity. The implied authority of nature, in turn, follows its own dynamic and highly ambivalent logic of representation. Greece operated as a material symbol, one that shared the brittle structure of the Romantic image. To explicate this enabling structure this study draws on the critical writings of Herder, Schiller and the early Romantics, while grounding mainly German philhellenic writing in its cultural and political context. Main authors discussed are Friedrich Hölderlin and Wilhelm Müller, but also the first generation of Greek writers in the new nation state after 1821: Alexandros Rizos Rangavis, Panagiotis Soutsos, Andreas Kalvos and Dionysios Solomos. To enlist authors challenged to write from within the place of Greece allows not only a new take on the problematic imagery of Greece, but also gives a new dimension to the study of Hellenism as a trans-national movement.
Kent Puckett
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195332759
- eISBN:
- 9780199868131
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332759.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the ...
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While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.Less
While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.
David Paul Nord
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- July 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195173116
- eISBN:
- 9780199835683
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195173112.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
In the years after 1815, a few visionary entrepreneurs decided the time was right to launch true mass media in America. They believed it was possible through new technology, national organization, ...
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In the years after 1815, a few visionary entrepreneurs decided the time was right to launch true mass media in America. They believed it was possible through new technology, national organization, and the grace of God to place the same printed message into the hands of every man, woman, and child in America. Though these entrepreneurs were savvy businessmen, their publishing enterprises were not commercial businesses. They were nonprofit religious organizations, including the American Bible Society, American Tract Society, and American Sunday School Union. Faith in Reading tells the story of the noncommercial origins of mass media in America. The theme is how religious publishers learned to work against the flow of ordinary commerce. Religious publishing societies believed that reading was too important to be left to the “market revolution”; they sought to foil the market through the “visible hand” of organization. Though religious publishers worked against the market, they employed modern printing technologies and business methods, and were remarkably successful, churning out millions of Bibles, tracts, religious books, and periodicals. At the same time, they tried to teach people to read those books in the most traditional way. Their aim was to use new mass media to encourage old reading habits. This book examines both publishers and readers. It is about how religious publishing societies imagined their readers. It is also about reader response — how ordinary readers received and read religious books and tracts in early 19th century America.Less
In the years after 1815, a few visionary entrepreneurs decided the time was right to launch true mass media in America. They believed it was possible through new technology, national organization, and the grace of God to place the same printed message into the hands of every man, woman, and child in America. Though these entrepreneurs were savvy businessmen, their publishing enterprises were not commercial businesses. They were nonprofit religious organizations, including the American Bible Society, American Tract Society, and American Sunday School Union. Faith in Reading tells the story of the noncommercial origins of mass media in America. The theme is how religious publishers learned to work against the flow of ordinary commerce. Religious publishing societies believed that reading was too important to be left to the “market revolution”; they sought to foil the market through the “visible hand” of organization. Though religious publishers worked against the market, they employed modern printing technologies and business methods, and were remarkably successful, churning out millions of Bibles, tracts, religious books, and periodicals. At the same time, they tried to teach people to read those books in the most traditional way. Their aim was to use new mass media to encourage old reading habits. This book examines both publishers and readers. It is about how religious publishing societies imagined their readers. It is also about reader response — how ordinary readers received and read religious books and tracts in early 19th century America.
Jeremy Morris
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199545315
- eISBN:
- 9780191602825
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545315.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology, History of Christianity
This book offers a reassessment of the theology of Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872), one of the most significant theologians of the modern Church of England. It seeks to place Maurice’s theology ...
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This book offers a reassessment of the theology of Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872), one of the most significant theologians of the modern Church of England. It seeks to place Maurice’s theology in the context of nineteenth-century conflicts over the social role of the Church, and over the truth of the Christian revelation. Maurice is known today mostly for his seminal role in the formation of Christian Socialism, and for his dismissal from his chair at King’s College, London, over his denial of the doctrine of eternal punishment. Drawing on the whole range of Maurice’s extensive published work, this book argues that his theology as well as his social and educational activity were held together above all by his commitment to a renewal of Anglican ecclesiology. At a time when, following the social upheavals of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, many of his contemporaries feared that the authority of the Christian Church — and particularly of the Church of England — was under threat, Maurice sought to reinvigorate his Church’s sense of mission by emphasizing its national responsibility and its theological inclusiveness. In the process, he pioneered a new appreciation of the diversity of Christian traditions that was to be of great importance for the Church of England’s ecumenical commitment. He also sought to limit the damage of internal Church division by promoting a view of the Church’s comprehensiveness that acknowledged the complementary truth of convictions fiercely held by competing parties.Less
This book offers a reassessment of the theology of Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872), one of the most significant theologians of the modern Church of England. It seeks to place Maurice’s theology in the context of nineteenth-century conflicts over the social role of the Church, and over the truth of the Christian revelation. Maurice is known today mostly for his seminal role in the formation of Christian Socialism, and for his dismissal from his chair at King’s College, London, over his denial of the doctrine of eternal punishment. Drawing on the whole range of Maurice’s extensive published work, this book argues that his theology as well as his social and educational activity were held together above all by his commitment to a renewal of Anglican ecclesiology. At a time when, following the social upheavals of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, many of his contemporaries feared that the authority of the Christian Church — and particularly of the Church of England — was under threat, Maurice sought to reinvigorate his Church’s sense of mission by emphasizing its national responsibility and its theological inclusiveness. In the process, he pioneered a new appreciation of the diversity of Christian traditions that was to be of great importance for the Church of England’s ecumenical commitment. He also sought to limit the damage of internal Church division by promoting a view of the Church’s comprehensiveness that acknowledged the complementary truth of convictions fiercely held by competing parties.
Matthew Rebhorn
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199751303
- eISBN:
- 9780199932559
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751303.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, Drama
Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier, 1829–1893, offers the first synoptic treatment of the history of American frontier performance ranging from Jacksonian America to Buffalo ...
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Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier, 1829–1893, offers the first synoptic treatment of the history of American frontier performance ranging from Jacksonian America to Buffalo Bill's Wild West show at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. This project is not simply an addition to the history of the American theater. It reconceives how the frontier was—and still is—defined in performance and what it means for that frontier to be called “American.” This project finds, in a series of plays written between 1829 and 1881, a theatrical genealogy that worked aesthetically and politically to challenge Manifest Destiny. By tracing performances of frontiersmen and freaks, Indians and octoroons in theaters stretching from Massachusetts to Georgia, this work shows how a succession of authors created the image of a transgressive frontier. They put that transgressive image with its fluid construction of identity up against the melodramatic frontier of hegemonic expansion that led to Buffalo Bill. This project argues that American theatrical aesthetics changed to accommodate alternative modes of performance in the nineteenth century, making the performance of the frontier the central genre in the construction of American drama. The American frontier is not just a historical “process” or a geographic “place,” as recent revisionist historians have argued. Rather, it is a set of performative practices conditioned by history and geography. Most Americans did not travel outside the metropole. For them, the frontier was created as much on the footboards of New York City as on the plains of the West, and for them, the frontier performed in the theater was thematically richer, more diverse, and more radical than critics have acknowledged.Less
Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier, 1829–1893, offers the first synoptic treatment of the history of American frontier performance ranging from Jacksonian America to Buffalo Bill's Wild West show at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. This project is not simply an addition to the history of the American theater. It reconceives how the frontier was—and still is—defined in performance and what it means for that frontier to be called “American.” This project finds, in a series of plays written between 1829 and 1881, a theatrical genealogy that worked aesthetically and politically to challenge Manifest Destiny. By tracing performances of frontiersmen and freaks, Indians and octoroons in theaters stretching from Massachusetts to Georgia, this work shows how a succession of authors created the image of a transgressive frontier. They put that transgressive image with its fluid construction of identity up against the melodramatic frontier of hegemonic expansion that led to Buffalo Bill. This project argues that American theatrical aesthetics changed to accommodate alternative modes of performance in the nineteenth century, making the performance of the frontier the central genre in the construction of American drama. The American frontier is not just a historical “process” or a geographic “place,” as recent revisionist historians have argued. Rather, it is a set of performative practices conditioned by history and geography. Most Americans did not travel outside the metropole. For them, the frontier was created as much on the footboards of New York City as on the plains of the West, and for them, the frontier performed in the theater was thematically richer, more diverse, and more radical than critics have acknowledged.
Ann Rigney
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199644018
- eISBN:
- 9780191738784
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199644018.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Using street-names referring to Waverley and Abbotsford as a starting point, this book explains how the work of Walter Scott (1771-1832) became an all-pervasive point of reference for cultural memory ...
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Using street-names referring to Waverley and Abbotsford as a starting point, this book explains how the work of Walter Scott (1771-1832) became an all-pervasive point of reference for cultural memory and collective identity in the nineteenth century, and why he no longer has this role. It breaks new ground in memory studies and the study of literary reception by examining the dynamics of cultural memory and the ‘social life’ of literary texts across several generations and multiple media. Attention is paid to the remediation of the Waverley novels as they travelled into painting, the theatre, and material culture, as well as to the role of ‘Scott’ as a memory site in the public sphere for a century after his death. Using a wide range of examples and supported by many illustrations, this book demonstrates how remembering Scott’s work helped shape national and transnational identities up to World War I, and contributed to the emergence of the idea of an English-speaking world encompassing Scotland, the British Empire, and the United States. It shows how Scott’s work provided an imaginative resource for creating a collective relation to the past that was compatible with widespread mobility and social change; and that he thus forged a potent alliance between memory, literature, and identity that was eminently suited to modernizing. In the process he helped prepare his own obsolescence. But if Scott’s work is now largely forgotten, his legacy continues in the widespread belief that showcasing the past is a condition for transcending it.Less
Using street-names referring to Waverley and Abbotsford as a starting point, this book explains how the work of Walter Scott (1771-1832) became an all-pervasive point of reference for cultural memory and collective identity in the nineteenth century, and why he no longer has this role. It breaks new ground in memory studies and the study of literary reception by examining the dynamics of cultural memory and the ‘social life’ of literary texts across several generations and multiple media. Attention is paid to the remediation of the Waverley novels as they travelled into painting, the theatre, and material culture, as well as to the role of ‘Scott’ as a memory site in the public sphere for a century after his death. Using a wide range of examples and supported by many illustrations, this book demonstrates how remembering Scott’s work helped shape national and transnational identities up to World War I, and contributed to the emergence of the idea of an English-speaking world encompassing Scotland, the British Empire, and the United States. It shows how Scott’s work provided an imaginative resource for creating a collective relation to the past that was compatible with widespread mobility and social change; and that he thus forged a potent alliance between memory, literature, and identity that was eminently suited to modernizing. In the process he helped prepare his own obsolescence. But if Scott’s work is now largely forgotten, his legacy continues in the widespread belief that showcasing the past is a condition for transcending it.
Nicholas Dames
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199208968
- eISBN:
- 9780191695759
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208968.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
How did the Victorians read novels? The author answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of ...
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How did the Victorians read novels? The author answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading. He demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel-reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine — as instead a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections, from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century, this book challenges our assumptions about what novel reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture's way of reading, responding, and feeling.Less
How did the Victorians read novels? The author answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading. He demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel-reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine — as instead a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections, from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century, this book challenges our assumptions about what novel reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture's way of reading, responding, and feeling.
Owen Chadwick
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780198269229
- eISBN:
- 9780191600456
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198269226.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Church History
This history of the ninteenth‐century popes covers the papacies of Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII and Pius X in their religious and political aspects. The period was dominated by the question of ...
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This history of the ninteenth‐century popes covers the papacies of Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII and Pius X in their religious and political aspects. The period was dominated by the question of whether the pope could hold political power and the relations of the papacy with the Catholic states of Europe. The major themes of the book are therefore the causes and consequences of the end of the Papal State as an independent power in Italy and the conflicts between the popes and the forces of the Risorgimento, fighting for the unification of Italy under the Piedmontese monarchy. At the same time it discusses the connected challenge of liberal movements in France, Spain and Portugal, and the separate question of the oppression of Catholic Poland by the Russian Empire. It shows how the popes opposed liberalism, democracy, socialism and ’the modern world’ in general, but how this intransigence served to strengthen papal authority among Catholic believers, with mostly unfortunate political consequences. The nuances in the attitude of each individual pope are traced through such major events as the revolutions of 1848, the First Vatican Council, the taking of Rome by Italian nationalists, the Kulturkampf in Germany, and the separation of Church and State in France. Catholic authority became more centralized, demonstrated by the Syllabus of Errors and the doctrine of papal infallibility and the moral demands made by the papacy over such issues as labour relations, marriage and divorce, and religious toleration. Separate chapters discuss the question of religion and national identity in Poland, Spain and Portugal; the fortunes of the religious orders; Catholic universities; the idea of reunion of the Churches; and the making of saints.Less
This history of the ninteenth‐century popes covers the papacies of Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII and Pius X in their religious and political aspects. The period was dominated by the question of whether the pope could hold political power and the relations of the papacy with the Catholic states of Europe. The major themes of the book are therefore the causes and consequences of the end of the Papal State as an independent power in Italy and the conflicts between the popes and the forces of the Risorgimento, fighting for the unification of Italy under the Piedmontese monarchy. At the same time it discusses the connected challenge of liberal movements in France, Spain and Portugal, and the separate question of the oppression of Catholic Poland by the Russian Empire. It shows how the popes opposed liberalism, democracy, socialism and ’the modern world’ in general, but how this intransigence served to strengthen papal authority among Catholic believers, with mostly unfortunate political consequences. The nuances in the attitude of each individual pope are traced through such major events as the revolutions of 1848, the First Vatican Council, the taking of Rome by Italian nationalists, the Kulturkampf in Germany, and the separation of Church and State in France. Catholic authority became more centralized, demonstrated by the Syllabus of Errors and the doctrine of papal infallibility and the moral demands made by the papacy over such issues as labour relations, marriage and divorce, and religious toleration. Separate chapters discuss the question of religion and national identity in Poland, Spain and Portugal; the fortunes of the religious orders; Catholic universities; the idea of reunion of the Churches; and the making of saints.
Jan Olof Bengtsson
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199297191
- eISBN:
- 9780191711374
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199297191.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
The book challenges the current view that personalism is primarily an early 20th-century phenomenon. The established definitions of personalism, mainly in terms of the American school of B. P. Bowne, ...
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The book challenges the current view that personalism is primarily an early 20th-century phenomenon. The established definitions of personalism, mainly in terms of the American school of B. P. Bowne, are shown to fit broadly the positions of much earlier continental European and Scandinavian philosophers and theologians. The beginnings of specifically personalistic thought are traced to F. H. Jacobi’s criticism of pantheism, first set forth in the 1780s, and the work of the later F. W. J. Schelling. Its development is then identified in the work of selected, representative thinkers who, throughout the 19th century, build on or develop further positions established by Jacobi and Schelling, primarily the thinkers belonging to the broad current of so-called ‘speculative theism’ in Germany and in Sweden. The development of idealistic personalism in Britain by A. S. Pringle-Pattison, J. R. Illingworth, C. C. J. Webb and others is shown to be parallel to the emergence of the American school. It is argued that these should be seen as a continuation of the earlier European movement. Both the American and the British schools drew on the work of H. Lotze, but the book points to the neglected continental European background to Lotze, the current of personalistic, partly idealistic, and theistic philosophy of which Lotze’s work was only one, late variation. Discerning the central themes of the emerging worldview of personalism, the book establishes that they developed consistently in a broad, unitary movement with a distinct historical profile from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, the nature and importance of which has heretofore been neglected in the history of philosophy and in historical theology.Less
The book challenges the current view that personalism is primarily an early 20th-century phenomenon. The established definitions of personalism, mainly in terms of the American school of B. P. Bowne, are shown to fit broadly the positions of much earlier continental European and Scandinavian philosophers and theologians. The beginnings of specifically personalistic thought are traced to F. H. Jacobi’s criticism of pantheism, first set forth in the 1780s, and the work of the later F. W. J. Schelling. Its development is then identified in the work of selected, representative thinkers who, throughout the 19th century, build on or develop further positions established by Jacobi and Schelling, primarily the thinkers belonging to the broad current of so-called ‘speculative theism’ in Germany and in Sweden. The development of idealistic personalism in Britain by A. S. Pringle-Pattison, J. R. Illingworth, C. C. J. Webb and others is shown to be parallel to the emergence of the American school. It is argued that these should be seen as a continuation of the earlier European movement. Both the American and the British schools drew on the work of H. Lotze, but the book points to the neglected continental European background to Lotze, the current of personalistic, partly idealistic, and theistic philosophy of which Lotze’s work was only one, late variation. Discerning the central themes of the emerging worldview of personalism, the book establishes that they developed consistently in a broad, unitary movement with a distinct historical profile from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, the nature and importance of which has heretofore been neglected in the history of philosophy and in historical theology.
Paul C. Gutjahr
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199740420
- eISBN:
- 9780199894703
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199740420.003.0000
- Subject:
- Religion, Church History
The Prologue argues for the importance of Charles Hodge in nineteenth-century American Protestantism through his publications (including forty years as the editor of the Biblical Repertory and ...
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The Prologue argues for the importance of Charles Hodge in nineteenth-century American Protestantism through his publications (including forty years as the editor of the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review) and his fifty-six year career as a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. It is impossible to fully understand the current shape of American Presbyterianism, American Calvinism, and much of twentieth-century Protestant Fundamentalism without carefully studying the theological influence of Charles Hodge.Less
The Prologue argues for the importance of Charles Hodge in nineteenth-century American Protestantism through his publications (including forty years as the editor of the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review) and his fifty-six year career as a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. It is impossible to fully understand the current shape of American Presbyterianism, American Calvinism, and much of twentieth-century Protestant Fundamentalism without carefully studying the theological influence of Charles Hodge.
Monika Baár
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199581184
- eISBN:
- 9780191722806
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199581184.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
Peripheral cultures have been largely absent from the European canon of historiography. The principal aim of this book is to contribute to redressing the balance. It does so by offering an insight ...
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Peripheral cultures have been largely absent from the European canon of historiography. The principal aim of this book is to contribute to redressing the balance. It does so by offering an insight into the complexities of historical writing in nineteenth‐century East‐Central Europe and by ascertaining this tradition's place within the European historiographical heritage. At the core of the book lies a comparative analysis of the life‐work of five prominent scholars: Joachim Lelewel (Polish); Simonas Daukantas (Lithuanian); František Palacký (Czech); Mihály Horváth (Hungarian) and Mihail Kogălniceanu (Romanian). Rather than approaching these scholars' historical achievements from a narrow perspective, the book accommodates them in the context of their promotion of a unified vision of national culture. It discusses their accomplishments in the fields of language and literature, their pursuits in publishing journals and primary sources, and their contribution to the institutionalization and professionalization of the historical discipline.Through the reconstruction of these scholars' shared intellectual background and an in‐depth analysis of their historical narrative the author puts forward the claim that the five historians' professional and political agenda, influenced predominantly by liberalism and Romanticism, shared far more with their contemporaries elsewhere than has previously been assumed and thus renders them genuine representatives of a common European tradition.Less
Peripheral cultures have been largely absent from the European canon of historiography. The principal aim of this book is to contribute to redressing the balance. It does so by offering an insight into the complexities of historical writing in nineteenth‐century East‐Central Europe and by ascertaining this tradition's place within the European historiographical heritage. At the core of the book lies a comparative analysis of the life‐work of five prominent scholars: Joachim Lelewel (Polish); Simonas Daukantas (Lithuanian); František Palacký (Czech); Mihály Horváth (Hungarian) and Mihail Kogălniceanu (Romanian). Rather than approaching these scholars' historical achievements from a narrow perspective, the book accommodates them in the context of their promotion of a unified vision of national culture. It discusses their accomplishments in the fields of language and literature, their pursuits in publishing journals and primary sources, and their contribution to the institutionalization and professionalization of the historical discipline.Through the reconstruction of these scholars' shared intellectual background and an in‐depth analysis of their historical narrative the author puts forward the claim that the five historians' professional and political agenda, influenced predominantly by liberalism and Romanticism, shared far more with their contemporaries elsewhere than has previously been assumed and thus renders them genuine representatives of a common European tradition.
Chris Beneke
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780195305555
- eISBN:
- 9780199784899
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195305558.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
The conclusion delineates the 19th-century boundaries of American religious pluralism. Those limits emerged most clearly in the persistence of anti-Semitism, the violence inflicted upon Mormons in ...
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The conclusion delineates the 19th-century boundaries of American religious pluralism. Those limits emerged most clearly in the persistence of anti-Semitism, the violence inflicted upon Mormons in western New York, Illinois, and Missouri, and the vitriolic common school debates of 1840 and 1841, which pitted New York’s Roman Catholic leaders against the Protestant-dominated Public School Society. In the case of the Mormons and the Catholics, especially, the 18th-century formula of equal rights for private worship and public inclusion failed. Anonymous living in the increasingly populous cities and the vast expanses of cheap land in the west allowed religious groups to avoid integration. Meanwhile, the continued dominance of Calvinist Protestantism made such isolation attractive. Yet, an important precedent had already been set. The success that early Americans had in maintaining civil peace and encouraging cooperative endeavors between different religious groups provided a reassuring template for future encounters with diversity.Less
The conclusion delineates the 19th-century boundaries of American religious pluralism. Those limits emerged most clearly in the persistence of anti-Semitism, the violence inflicted upon Mormons in western New York, Illinois, and Missouri, and the vitriolic common school debates of 1840 and 1841, which pitted New York’s Roman Catholic leaders against the Protestant-dominated Public School Society. In the case of the Mormons and the Catholics, especially, the 18th-century formula of equal rights for private worship and public inclusion failed. Anonymous living in the increasingly populous cities and the vast expanses of cheap land in the west allowed religious groups to avoid integration. Meanwhile, the continued dominance of Calvinist Protestantism made such isolation attractive. Yet, an important precedent had already been set. The success that early Americans had in maintaining civil peace and encouraging cooperative endeavors between different religious groups provided a reassuring template for future encounters with diversity.
Monika Baár
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199581184
- eISBN:
- 9780191722806
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199581184.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
Chapter 3, ‘Institutionalization and Professionalization’, examines the institutional setting of the five scholars' activities and investigates their role in the professionalization and ...
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Chapter 3, ‘Institutionalization and Professionalization’, examines the institutional setting of the five scholars' activities and investigates their role in the professionalization and institutionalization of the discipline. It explores the role of patriotic and scholarly societies in the organization of national culture and the historians' contribution to those activities. This is followed by the study of the universities' limited role in the promotion of historical studies in the region. Thereafter, the historians' contribution to the creation of periodicals and source collections is discussed and the claim is put forward that such ventures were instrumental in the formation of a unified national culture and language. Finally, examples of censorial intervention in their work are analysed, alongside the strategies which they devised in order to alleviate the impact of censorship.Less
Chapter 3, ‘Institutionalization and Professionalization’, examines the institutional setting of the five scholars' activities and investigates their role in the professionalization and institutionalization of the discipline. It explores the role of patriotic and scholarly societies in the organization of national culture and the historians' contribution to those activities. This is followed by the study of the universities' limited role in the promotion of historical studies in the region. Thereafter, the historians' contribution to the creation of periodicals and source collections is discussed and the claim is put forward that such ventures were instrumental in the formation of a unified national culture and language. Finally, examples of censorial intervention in their work are analysed, alongside the strategies which they devised in order to alleviate the impact of censorship.
Kirstie Blair
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199273942
- eISBN:
- 9780191706592
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199273942.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this ...
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This book considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to create affect. In the course of the nineteenth century, new medical investigations into the heart, along with the development of instruments such as the stethoscope, gave the pathological heart a strong presence in popular culture. As poets feared for their own hearts, their poetry embodied concerns about heartsickness in form as well as content. Concerns about the heart's status and its actions fed into the broader discourses of religion, gender, and nationalism, as well as medicine. These discourses are examined through close readings of works by Arnold, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, and others.Less
This book considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to create affect. In the course of the nineteenth century, new medical investigations into the heart, along with the development of instruments such as the stethoscope, gave the pathological heart a strong presence in popular culture. As poets feared for their own hearts, their poetry embodied concerns about heartsickness in form as well as content. Concerns about the heart's status and its actions fed into the broader discourses of religion, gender, and nationalism, as well as medicine. These discourses are examined through close readings of works by Arnold, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, and others.
Beth Palmer
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199599110
- eISBN:
- 9780191725371
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199599110.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book explores the ways in which women writers utilized the powerful position of author-editor to perform conventions of gender and genre in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth ...
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This book explores the ways in which women writers utilized the powerful position of author-editor to perform conventions of gender and genre in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat's magazines (Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society respectively) alongside their sensation fiction to explore the mutually influential strategies of authorship and editorship. The relationship between sensation's success as a popular fiction genre and its serialization in the periodical press was not just complexly reciprocal but also self-conscious and performative. Publishing sensation in Victorian magazines offered women writers a set of discursive strategies that they could transfer outwards into other cultural discourses and performances. With these strategies they could explore, enact and re-work contemporary notions of female agency and autonomy as well as negotiate contemporary criticism. Combining authorship and editorship gave these middle-class women exceptional control over the shaping of fiction, its production, and its dissemination. By paying attention to the ways in which the sensation genre is rooted in the press network this book offers a new, broader context for the phenomenal success of works like Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Ellen Wood's East Lynne. The book reaches back to the mid-nineteenth century to explore the press conditions initiated by figures like Charles Dickens and Mrs Beeton that facilitated the later success of these sensation writers. By looking forwards to the new woman writers of the 1890s the book draws conclusions regarding the legacies of sensational author-editorship in the Victorian press and beyond.Less
This book explores the ways in which women writers utilized the powerful position of author-editor to perform conventions of gender and genre in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat's magazines (Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society respectively) alongside their sensation fiction to explore the mutually influential strategies of authorship and editorship. The relationship between sensation's success as a popular fiction genre and its serialization in the periodical press was not just complexly reciprocal but also self-conscious and performative. Publishing sensation in Victorian magazines offered women writers a set of discursive strategies that they could transfer outwards into other cultural discourses and performances. With these strategies they could explore, enact and re-work contemporary notions of female agency and autonomy as well as negotiate contemporary criticism. Combining authorship and editorship gave these middle-class women exceptional control over the shaping of fiction, its production, and its dissemination. By paying attention to the ways in which the sensation genre is rooted in the press network this book offers a new, broader context for the phenomenal success of works like Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Ellen Wood's East Lynne. The book reaches back to the mid-nineteenth century to explore the press conditions initiated by figures like Charles Dickens and Mrs Beeton that facilitated the later success of these sensation writers. By looking forwards to the new woman writers of the 1890s the book draws conclusions regarding the legacies of sensational author-editorship in the Victorian press and beyond.
Charles Tilly and Lesley J. Wood
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780199251780
- eISBN:
- 9780191599057
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0199251789.003.0007
- Subject:
- Political Science, Comparative Politics
Combines network analysis and historical sociology to chart significant changes in patterns of social conflict (in particular, relationships of attack and claim making) among different social groups, ...
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Combines network analysis and historical sociology to chart significant changes in patterns of social conflict (in particular, relationships of attack and claim making) among different social groups, including royalty, parliament, local and national officials, trade, and workers, in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Building block models based on the intersection of actors and events, the authors map networks of contention in national politics before and after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, which increased the centrality of parliament in British politics. They highlight the process by which people, through collective action, not only create new forms of political repertoires but also forge relations to other actors, both at the local and the national level.Less
Combines network analysis and historical sociology to chart significant changes in patterns of social conflict (in particular, relationships of attack and claim making) among different social groups, including royalty, parliament, local and national officials, trade, and workers, in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Building block models based on the intersection of actors and events, the authors map networks of contention in national politics before and after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, which increased the centrality of parliament in British politics. They highlight the process by which people, through collective action, not only create new forms of political repertoires but also forge relations to other actors, both at the local and the national level.
Ayşe Çelikkol
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199769001
- eISBN:
- 9780199896943
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199769001.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
THis book offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain. The book argues that novelists and playwrights employed this genre to represent a radically new ...
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THis book offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain. The book argues that novelists and playwrights employed this genre to represent a radically new historical formation: the emergence of the global free market economy. In previous centuries, the British state had pursued an economic policy that privileged domestic goods over foreign ones. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, liberal economists maintained that commodity traffic across national borders should move outside the purview of the state, and their position gained increasing support. Amid economic transformation, Britons pondered the effects of vertiginous circulation. Would patriotic attachment to the homeland dissolve along with the preference for domestic goods? What would be the fate of the nation and the empire if commerce were uncontrollable? The literary genre of romance, characterized by protagonists who drift in lawless spaces, played a privileged role in addressing such pressing questions. From the figure of the smuggler to episodic plot structure, romance elements in fiction and drama narrated sprawling global markets and the fluidity of capital. Exploring works by Walter Scott, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and their lesser-known contemporaries, this book historicizes globalization as it traces the sense of dissolving borders and the perceived decline of national sovereignty back into the nineteenth century.Less
THis book offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain. The book argues that novelists and playwrights employed this genre to represent a radically new historical formation: the emergence of the global free market economy. In previous centuries, the British state had pursued an economic policy that privileged domestic goods over foreign ones. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, liberal economists maintained that commodity traffic across national borders should move outside the purview of the state, and their position gained increasing support. Amid economic transformation, Britons pondered the effects of vertiginous circulation. Would patriotic attachment to the homeland dissolve along with the preference for domestic goods? What would be the fate of the nation and the empire if commerce were uncontrollable? The literary genre of romance, characterized by protagonists who drift in lawless spaces, played a privileged role in addressing such pressing questions. From the figure of the smuggler to episodic plot structure, romance elements in fiction and drama narrated sprawling global markets and the fluidity of capital. Exploring works by Walter Scott, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and their lesser-known contemporaries, this book historicizes globalization as it traces the sense of dissolving borders and the perceived decline of national sovereignty back into the nineteenth century.
Philip V. Bohlman
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195178326
- eISBN:
- 9780199869992
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178326.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
As the first of three chapters on the “ontologies” of Jewish music — music’s aesthetic, cultural, and musical identities and capacity to exist in the world of modern Jewish society — this chapter ...
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As the first of three chapters on the “ontologies” of Jewish music — music’s aesthetic, cultural, and musical identities and capacity to exist in the world of modern Jewish society — this chapter includes a series of case studies that illustrate moments when Jewish music is identified as such. Invention refers to the ways in which imagining Jewish music undergoes a change to practicing and performing it. The music of the urban synagogue, therefore, passes from oral tradition to the hands of professionals in the nineteenth century, the Jewish cantors whose lives and publications the chapter details. Folk music attracts the attention of Jewish scholars, who ascribe specific attributes and categories to the music they collect in villages and publish in the cities of Europe. Above all, terms such as “Jewish music” acquire new currency by the end of the nineteenth century, inventing Jewish music for modern Jews as if that music had existed since time immemorial.Less
As the first of three chapters on the “ontologies” of Jewish music — music’s aesthetic, cultural, and musical identities and capacity to exist in the world of modern Jewish society — this chapter includes a series of case studies that illustrate moments when Jewish music is identified as such. Invention refers to the ways in which imagining Jewish music undergoes a change to practicing and performing it. The music of the urban synagogue, therefore, passes from oral tradition to the hands of professionals in the nineteenth century, the Jewish cantors whose lives and publications the chapter details. Folk music attracts the attention of Jewish scholars, who ascribe specific attributes and categories to the music they collect in villages and publish in the cities of Europe. Above all, terms such as “Jewish music” acquire new currency by the end of the nineteenth century, inventing Jewish music for modern Jews as if that music had existed since time immemorial.
Elizabeth Elkin Grammer
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195139617
- eISBN:
- 9780199834242
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195139615.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
This literary study concerns the spiritual autobiographies of seven nineteenth‐century American women who found themselves called, often by way of wild visions, to become itinerant evangelists. ...
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This literary study concerns the spiritual autobiographies of seven nineteenth‐century American women who found themselves called, often by way of wild visions, to become itinerant evangelists. Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Nancy Towle, Lydia Sexton, Laura Haviland, Julia Foote, and Amanda Berry Smith, though living and writing in an age which perfected the ideology of domesticity, chose literal homelessness for long periods of their lives, thus renouncing their claim upon the paradigm by which many northern women, black and white, measured their lives. Such itinerant lives were no doubt hard to live; they were even harder to write. All autobiographies, of course, attempt to make a story out of the welter of remembered events which constitute the writer's raw material; they attempt, that is, to discover the pattern and the meaning in experience. But if the experiences in question are new and unfamiliar, where will the autobiographer find the cultural reference points which can reveal, or impose, pattern and meaning? The autobiographies which these women wrote are remarkable documents—sometimes artless, often long, and nearly always desperate attempts to assemble, out of familiar cultural materials, plausible representations of lives which were anything but familiar. Invoking in quick succession different and even contradictory models of self—the biblical paradigm of the suffering servant, the domestic ideal of the nurturing mother, and the capitalistic image of the fantastically productive entrepreneur—they attempt to patch together comprehensible Lives which would somehow be equal to their radically original lives. Literally, psychologically, and ideologically, these female preachers were “out of place,” both in the world of nineteenth‐century evangelicalism and in American culture generally. It was in the hope of situating themselves in that culture, of assuring their readers and themselves of their place in nineteenth‐century America, that they wrote their books. Ultimately, however, these women would write somewhat anxious narratives, itinerant autobiographies still in search of their endings and meanings, books which attempt to summon up the interpretive communities capable of understanding strangers and pilgrims. These are, then, stories about the poetics of itinerancy and also about gender and genre, about the particular predicament of women negotiating with their culture for identity.Less
This literary study concerns the spiritual autobiographies of seven nineteenth‐century American women who found themselves called, often by way of wild visions, to become itinerant evangelists. Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Nancy Towle, Lydia Sexton, Laura Haviland, Julia Foote, and Amanda Berry Smith, though living and writing in an age which perfected the ideology of domesticity, chose literal homelessness for long periods of their lives, thus renouncing their claim upon the paradigm by which many northern women, black and white, measured their lives. Such itinerant lives were no doubt hard to live; they were even harder to write. All autobiographies, of course, attempt to make a story out of the welter of remembered events which constitute the writer's raw material; they attempt, that is, to discover the pattern and the meaning in experience. But if the experiences in question are new and unfamiliar, where will the autobiographer find the cultural reference points which can reveal, or impose, pattern and meaning? The autobiographies which these women wrote are remarkable documents—sometimes artless, often long, and nearly always desperate attempts to assemble, out of familiar cultural materials, plausible representations of lives which were anything but familiar. Invoking in quick succession different and even contradictory models of self—the biblical paradigm of the suffering servant, the domestic ideal of the nurturing mother, and the capitalistic image of the fantastically productive entrepreneur—they attempt to patch together comprehensible Lives which would somehow be equal to their radically original lives. Literally, psychologically, and ideologically, these female preachers were “out of place,” both in the world of nineteenth‐century evangelicalism and in American culture generally. It was in the hope of situating themselves in that culture, of assuring their readers and themselves of their place in nineteenth‐century America, that they wrote their books. Ultimately, however, these women would write somewhat anxious narratives, itinerant autobiographies still in search of their endings and meanings, books which attempt to summon up the interpretive communities capable of understanding strangers and pilgrims. These are, then, stories about the poetics of itinerancy and also about gender and genre, about the particular predicament of women negotiating with their culture for identity.
