Gracious Affections: Affect and the Rise of Evangelicalism in Early America
Item
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Title
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Gracious Affections: Affect and the Rise of Evangelicalism in Early America
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:97c537ab25e8:11077
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identifier
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11423
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Creator
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Meyer, Neil,
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Contributor
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David S. Reynolds
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American studies | Religious history | American history | affect studies | awakenings | evangelicalism | sentimentalism
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Abstract
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In this dissertation I build on current theorists of affect in order to critically foreground the centrality of embodied religious experience in the spread of evangelicalism through the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States and the larger Atlantic world. I argue that the social and embodied religious practices within evangelical public spaces altered the writing and reading practices of evangelicals in the early republic by attempting to recreate, but also limit, the powerful and embodied religious feelings created within those spaces. This dissertation is structured around the writing and embodied practices of lay publics who were animated by the ecstatic religious experiences found at revivals and other religious gatherings and the work of ministers who sought to both propagate and control that energy through the authority of the clergy. By bringing the fields of literary studies, religious history, queer theory, and theories of affect into conversation around evangelicalism, this dissertation revises the conventional wisdom of American religious history, and offers new ways to understand evangelicalism's complex influence on early American writing practices and the greater culture at large.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
