Perpetual Scriptures in Nineteenth-Century America

Literary, Religious, and Political Quests for Textual Authority

Prof. or Dr. Jeff Smith (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

304 Seiten

2023
Bloomsbury Academic USA (Verlag)
978-1-5013-9895-7 (ISBN)

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In the tumultuous decades of rapid expansion and change between the American Founding and the Civil War, Americans confronted a cluster of overlapping crises whose common theme was the difficulty of finding authority in written texts. The issue arose from several disruptive developments: rising challenges to the traditional authority of the Bible in a society that was intensely Protestant; persistent worries over America’s lack of a “national literature” and an independent cultural identity; and the slavery crisis, which provoked tremendous struggles over clashing interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, even as these “parascriptures” were rising to the status of a kind of quasi-sacred secular canon.

At the same time but from the opposite direction, new mass media were creating a new, industrial-scale print culture that put a premium on very non-sacred, disposable text: mass-produced “news,” dispensed immediately and in huge quantities but meant only for the day or hour. Perpetual Scriptures in Nineteenth-Century America identifies key features of the writings, careers and cultural politics of several prominent Americans as responses to this cluster of challenges. In their varied attempts to vindicate the sacred and to merge the timeless with the urgent present, Joseph Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Abraham Lincoln, and other religious and political leaders and men and women of letters helped define American literary culture as an ongoing quest for new “bibles,” or what Emerson called a “perpetual scripture.”

Jeff Smith teaches English and American Studies at Masaryk University, Czech Republic, and is the author of The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online (2009) and Unthinking the Unthinkable: Nuclear Weapons and Western Culture (1989). He has been a news reporter, theater director, Fulbright Fellow and research fellow at Oxford University, and previously taught at UCLA and USC before his current position teaching American Studies in the Czech Republic.

Introduction: A Nation Founded on Writing
Part One: The Quest for New Prophets
1. The “World’s Oldest Book” and the Crisis of Scriptural Authority
2. Revivals, Reaction, and the Ultra-Protestants
3. Scriptures as Sepulchres: Unitarians and Transcendentalists
4. Spirit and Kingdom: Language, Social Action, and the “True Reviving”
Part Two: The Quest for New Scriptures
5. American Parascriptures: The Making of a National Political Canon
6. Sacred Ephemera: News, Literature, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin
7. Walt Whitman’s “New Bible” and the Spiritual Vitalizing of Facts
Part Three: The Quest for National Salvation
8. Slavery, Liberty, and the Three Great Charters
9. Lincoln’s Miniature Bible: Salvation History in the Gettysburg Address
Conclusion: The New American Testaments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	22.08.2023
Zusatzinfo	2 bw illus
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-5013-9895-4 / 1501398954
ISBN-13	978-1-5013-9895-7 / 9781501398957
Zustand	Neuware