Authority and reform
Subtitle: religious and educational discourses in nineteenth-century New England literature
By: Mark G. Vásquez.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Knoxville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 393
Subjects: American literature -- New England -- History and criticism.; Religion and literature -- New England -- History -- 19th century.; American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Educational change -- New England -- History -- 19th century.; Didactic literature, American -- History and criticism.; Authors, American -- Homes and haunts -- New England.; English language -- 19th century -- Rhetoric.; Education in literature.; Religion in literature.; New England -- Intellectual life -- 19th century.; New England -- In literature.
Description: "This book explores the ways in which the interplay of religion and education fostered the concepts of self-culture and social reform and shows how such interplay helped construct varying epistemologies, individualities, and discourse communities. Mark Vasquez traces the evolution of self-culture from a theological concept to an educational and literary one.

Drawing on examples ranging from late-eighteenth-century epistolary novels and religious pamphlets to temperance texts, essays, and late-nineteenth-century sentimental novels, he shows how writers applied prevailing languages of power to promote the sweeping changes that churches and schools seemed incapable of carrying out by themselves.

As a reformative force, the literary text encouraged activism among all its readers, but affected (and was affected by) women more profoundly than, and differently from, men.".

"Vasquez examines the Unitarian-Transcendental tradition as represented in the works of William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller, and the Calvinist-Evangelical line of the Beechers. Despite philosophical and stylistic differences between the two schools, Vasquez shows that there was mutual influence in the evolving New England discourse of self-culture.

By reconsidering changes in religious, educational, and literary cultures in terms of the construction of individual and community identity, he demonstrates that authority and reform arose as the most pervasive social concerns of that era. A final chapter considers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott as inheritors of these respective legacies, urging their female readers to temper self-culture with self-sacrifice and to move beyond the domestic sphere toward an epicene community."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 353-382) and index.
Table of contents: title: The "appearance of truth and simplicity" : sermonic and pedagogical styles and the post-revolutionary epistolary novel; title: "Correctly forming the public opinion" : religious and educational discourses, self-culture, and popular literature; title: "The liberty of substituting my own expressions" : women writers, revised rhetorics, and the paradoxes of mediation; title: Rebellious sons, representative men : Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Ward Beecher; title: Epicene rhetoric and reform : gender and genre in Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne; title: Self-sacrifice and sympathy : Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and the limits of domesticity.