Detailed Information on Publication Record
2023
"Perpetual Scriptures" in Nineteenth-Century America : Literary, Religious and Political Quests for Textual Authority.
SMITH, Jeffrey AlanBasic information
Original name
"Perpetual Scriptures" in Nineteenth-Century America : Literary, Religious and Political Quests for Textual Authority.
Authors
SMITH, Jeffrey Alan (840 United States of America, guarantor, belonging to the institution)
Edition
New York, 304 pp. Not specified, 2023
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing
Other information
Language
English
Type of outcome
Odborná kniha
Field of Study
60206 Specific literatures
Country of publisher
United States of America
Confidentiality degree
není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství
Publication form
printed version "print"
References:
RIV identification code
RIV/00216224:14210/23:00130463
Organization unit
Faculty of Arts
ISBN
978-1-5013-9895-7
Keywords in English
American literature; nineteenth century; literary nationalism; Transcendentalism; Bible; parascripture; early journalism
Tags
Tags
International impact, Reviewed
Změněno: 8/4/2024 13:51, Mgr. Michal Petr
Abstract
V originále
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.”
Links
| MUNI/A/1054/2022, interní kód MU |
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