The Economy of Religion in American Literature - Culture and the Politics of Redemption

List of contents

Introduction: A New Theory of the Sacred

Chapter 1
The Boiled-Over District: Effervescence and Adaptation During the Market Revolution

Chapter 2
The Salvific Power of Affect: Sentimentalism in the Labor Fiction of Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Chapter 3
The American Fetish: Religious Economics in the Novels of William Dean Howells

Chapter 4
Mistaking “Shadows for Gods”: Class and the Christ Novel in the Progressive Era

Chapter 5
“Christianity Incorporated”: Sinclair Lewis and the Taylorization of American Protestantism

Chapter 6
Gastonia Revisited: Religion, Literature, and the Loray Mill Strike of 1929

Chapter 7
“The blackness of God”: Race and Religion in the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

About the author

Andrew Ball is Editorial Assistant for the journal Communications in Mathematical Physics, based at Harvard University, USA.

Summary

Examining how economic change influences religion, and the way literature mediates that influence, this book provides a thorough reassessment of modern American culture. Focusing on the period 1840-1940, the author shows how the development of capitalism reshaped American Protestantism and addresses the necessary role of literature in that process.
Arguing that the “spirit of capitalism” was not fostered by traditional Puritanism, Ball explores the ways that Christianity was transformed by the market and industrial revolutions. This book refutes the long-held secularization thesis by showing that modernity was a time when new forms of the sacred proliferated, and that this religious flourishing was essential to the production of American culture.
Ball draws from the work of Émile Durkheim and cultural sociology to interpret modern social upheavals like religious awakenings, revivalism, and the labor movement. Examining work from writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, Jack London, and Countee Cullen, he shows how concepts of salvation fundamentally intersect with matters of race, gender, and class, and proposes a theory that explains the enchantment of modern American society.

Foreword

This book offers a thorough reassessment of the relationship of religion and economics in American culture.

Product details

• Authors: Ball Andrew Ball, Andrew Ball, Ball Andrew
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.05.2022
• EAN: 9781350231672
• ISBN: 978-1-350-23167-2
• No. of pages: 272
• Series: New Directions in Religion and Literature
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, RELIGION / Christianity / Literature & the Arts, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Religion, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literature: history & criticism, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Christian spirituality & religious experience, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Relating to Christian people and groups, 1929 to c 1939 (period of the Great Depression), c 1890 to c 1929 (Progressive Era in the USA)