A language "burning and God-given": the creative form of religious writing in America, 1790-1865

My dissertation describes how religious ideas shaped aesthetic innovation in popular American literature from the early national moral novel to racial uplift fiction. Nineteenth-century writing, particularly fiction, was shaped by conflicting pressures, including historicism (the belief that history reflected social forces rather than divine intentions), romanticism (which celebrated artistic originality), and the resurgence of evangelical religion. As a result, I argue, traditional religious ideas about writing as a revelation of the divine in art persevered well into the century, shaping genres that simultaneously responded to growing interest in historicism and aesthetic ingenuity. I trace the adaptations that evolved in this context as contemporaries transformed mimetic fiction and autobiography—genres grounded in historical representation—into new forms with avowedly religious and even doctrinal ambitions: moral novels, tract tales, Christian best sellers, slave narratives, and didactic tales about slavery. Describing how these works converted the aesthetic form and historical matter of fiction and autobiography into vehicles for spiritual and moral ideals, my dissertation reveals the religious dimension of modern literature’s evolution in America. In describing religion’s importance to American literature, I characterize modernity as a site of epistemological contestation rather than religious recedence. Drawing on recent criticism that has broken with traditional secularization theory, which proposed the diminishment and privatization of religion as a feature of the modern era, my project understands modernity as a proliferation of epistemologies that spoke imperfectly to one another. Combining this definition with narrative theory, book history, and reader-response criticism, I describe the generic adaptations that marked religion’s encounter with modern historicism and aesthetic theory. Chapters one and two argue that fiction was used for moral purposes, conceived as an alternative to doctrine, in the early national moral novel, and for evangelical ends in antebellum tract tales. In chapters three and four I explain how best selling Christian novels and slave narratives grappled with contemporary political problems, transforming history into an autonomous source of meaning rather than the sign of God’s will. Describing antebellum literature’s underappreciated literariness—its combination of the reflexive form and historical matter of modern literature with religious and moral ideas—my project illuminates modernity’s complex debt not only to historicism and theories of aesthetics, but also to older and still influential ideas of incarnational art.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Kathleen Mary Howar