Perpetual Scriptures in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary, Religious, and Political Quests for Textual Authority

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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 Americas 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.

Reviews

This is a work of literary, intellectual, and cultural history of unusual ambition and originality in its expansive scope, potentially of much interest to academic readers from graduate students to senior scholars in a range of Americanist fields: American religion, literature, history, politics, journalism, and such interdisciplines as print culture and history of the book studies. * Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of American Literature, Harvard University, USA *
A fascinating and original exploration of the sacred and secular texts by which nineteenth-century Americans sought to define the nation and its purposes. * James Gilbert, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Maryland, USA *

Author Bio

Jeff Smith teaches English and American Studies at Masaryk University, Czech Republic, and is the author of The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online (2009) and Unthinking the Unthinkable: Nuclear Weapons and Western Culture (1989). He has been a news reporter, theater director, Fulbright Fellow and research fellow at Oxford University, and previously taught at UCLA and USC before his current position teaching American Studies in the Czech Republic.