RT Book
T1 Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature
A1 Fessenden, Tracy 1961-
LA English
PP Princeton, N.J.
PB Princeton University Press
YR 2007
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1658619862
AB Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere. Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
CN BR526
SN 9781400837304
K1 Religion : Christianity : General
K1 Religion and literature : United States
K1 Secularism : United States
K1 American literature : History and criticism
K1 Christianity and culture : United States
K1 RELIGION / Religion, Politics & State
K1 LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General
K1 Protestantism
K1 Religion
K1 Slavery
K1 Christianity
K1 Secularism
K1 Secularization
K1 Narrative
K1 Puritans
K1 Catholic Church
K1 Abolitionism
K1 Jews
K1 Writing
K1 Calvinism
K1 Racism
K1 Americans
K1 Ideology
K1 Mark Twain
K1 Freedom Of Religion
K1 The New England Primer
K1 Rhetoric
K1 Huckleberry Finn
K1 Religious Identity
K1 Catholicism
K1 Literature
K1 Spirituality
K1 Presbyterianism
K1 Sermon
K1 Harriet Beecher Stowe
K1 I Wish (manhwa)
K1 Separation of church and state
DO 10.1515/9781400837304