Project Description 

In response to a newly charged and religiously inflected global, political landscape, Stanley Fish provocatively argued in 2005 that religion would likely “succeed high theory and race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in academe.” Despite Fish’s predictions, secular critics have been slow to embrace religion as a focus of critical inquiry. This scholarly elision has left a particularly unfortunate gap in our understanding of the life and literature of nineteenth-century American women. Women’s culture of the era was, in fact, immersed in religious doctrine and practice, most often within Christian contexts, and many female authors of the period deployed representations of faith and faith communities to various cultural ends. Yet nineteenth-century scholars—and feminist scholars in particular—have been reticent to employ the rubric of religion in their literary analysis. The critical void has led to a narrow view of religion and nineteenth-century American women—a false sense that feminine religious experience of the era was homogeneous and bounded by a largely unexamined faith in a repressive, mainstream Protestantism.

Embracing the complexities of religion in nineteenth-century women’s culture—both its repressive and revolutionary potentiality—this edited collection seeks to articulate how female authors deployed, revised, challenged, and, in some cases, rejected conventional theologies and doctrines. Exploring the greatly diverse expressions of, reactions to, and uses for religion in women’s texts of the era, this volume will examine how female authors repurposed religious sentiments for their own spiritual, cultural, or political ends. Without neglecting repressive elements of institutionalized religion, this text will emphasize the subversive and sometimes empowering treatment of religion in the work of nineteenth-century American women writers.