Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in Nineteenth-century AmericaOxford University Press, 2003 - 211 páginas This literary study concerns the spiritual autobiographies of seven nineteenth-century American women who found themselves called, often by way of wild visions, to become itinerant evangelists. Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Nancy Towle, Lydia Sexton, Laura Haviland, Julia Foote, and Amanda Berry Smith, though living and writing in an age which perfected the ideology of domesticity, chose literal homelessness for long periods of their lives, thus renouncing their claim upon the paradigm by which many northern women, black and white, measured their lives. Such itinerant lives were no doubt hard to live; they were even harder to write. All autobiographies, of course, attempt to make a story out of the welter of remembered events which constitute the writer's raw material; they attempt, that is, to discover the pattern and the meaning in experience. But if the experiences in question are new and unfamiliar, where will the autobiographer find the cultural reference points which can reveal, or impose, pattern and meaning? The autobiographies which these women wrote are remarkable documents—sometimes artless, often long, and nearly always desperate attempts to assemble, out of familiar cultural materials, plausible representations of lives which were anything but familiar. Invoking in quick succession different and even contradictory models of self—the biblical paradigm of the suffering servant, the domestic ideal of the nurturing mother, and the capitalistic image of the fantastically productive entrepreneur—they attempt to patch together comprehensible Lives which would somehow be equal to their radically original lives. Literally, psychologically, and ideologically, these female preachers were "out of place," both in the world of nineteenth-century evangelicalism and in American culture generally. |
Contenido
Stirring and Strange Autobiographies of NineteenthCentury Female Itinerant Preachers | 3 |
Female Evangelists and Domestic Ideology | 27 |
Female Evangelists in the Marketplace of Salvation | 57 |
Singularity and the Uses of Opposition | 83 |
Evangelical Women Writers and the Form of Autobiography | 112 |
The Call of the Preachers the Cry of the Faithful Evangelical Women Writers and the Search for an Interpretive Community | 137 |
Notes | 147 |
171 | |
195 | |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in ... Elizabeth Elkin Grammer Vista previa limitada - 2002 |
Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in ... Elizabeth Elkin Grammer Vista previa limitada - 2002 |
Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in ... Elizabeth Elkin Grammer Vista previa limitada - 2002 |
Términos y frases comunes
African American African Methodist Episcopal Amanda Smith argues authority autobiography Bible black women Brekus called to preach career Carla Peterson Cartwright century Charles Finney Christ Christian claim conversion culture’s David Marks dominant culture Elaw’s emphasis added evangelical faith female evangelists female itinerants female preachers feminist Finney Foote’s Freewill Baptists gender Hannah Whitall Smith Higher Life movement Holiness Holiness Movement husband individualism itinerant preachers Jarena Lee Julia Foote labors Laura Haviland Lee’s literary lives Lord Lydia Sexton male itinerants marginality marketplace metaphor Methodist Episcopal Church minister ministry mother Nancy Towle narrative nineteenth nineteenth-century America nineteenth-century women one’s Phoebe Palmer plot preach the gospel Protestant pulpit Quaker readers religion Religious Experience revivalism salvation sanctification Satan Scripture Second Great Awakening sects sister social souls spiritual autobiographies story struggle success tells tion Towle’s traveled Wild Visions woman women preachers Women’s Autobiography words writing York Zilpha Elaw