ABSTRACT

Nineteenth-century American women’s culture was immersed in religious experience and female authors of the era employed representations of faith to various cultural ends. Focusing primarily on non-canonical texts, this collection explores the diversity of religious discourse in nineteenth-century women’s literature. The contributors examine fiction, political writings, poetry, and memoirs by professional authors, social activists, and women of faith, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet E. Wilson, Sarah Piatt, Julia Ward Howe, Julia A. J. Foote, Lucy Mack Smith, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Fanny Newell. Embracing the complexities of lived religion in women’s culture-both its repressive and its revolutionary potential-Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion articulates how American women writers adopted the language of religious sentiment for their own cultural, political, or spiritual ends.

chapter Chapter 1|18 pages

Renegade Religious

Performativity, Female Identity, and the Antebellum Convent-Escape Narrative

chapter Chapter 2|12 pages

Shaping Narrative

Julia A. J. Foote's Theology of Holiness

chapter Chapter 3|14 pages

Composing Radical Lives

Women as Autonomous Religious Seekers and Nineteenth-Century Memoirs

chapter Chapter 4|18 pages

“Come Right Down With Me”

Poverty, Agency, and Incarnational Reading in the Work of Rebecca Harding Davis

chapter Chapter 6|16 pages

“One [Hermaphroditic] Angel”

Swedenborg, Gender Complementarity, and Divine Love in Julia Ward Howe's The Hermaphrodite 1

chapter Chapter 7|14 pages

“The Grace of God Assisting” 1

Abolitionist Women and the Politics of Religion

chapter Chapter 8|16 pages

“A Religion of Their Own”

Louisa May Alcott's New American Religion

chapter Chapter 9|16 pages

“A startling reform”

Women and Christianity in the Work of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps