The Economy of Religion in American Literature

Culture and the Politics of Redemption

Andrew Ball

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350231702
• eBook ISBN: 9781350233997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A New Theory of the Sacred
• 1 The Boiled-Over District: Effervescence and Adaptation during the Market Revolution
• 2 The Salvific Power of Affect: Sentimentalism in the Labor Fiction of Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
• 3 The American Fetish: Religious Economics in the Novels of William Dean Howells
• 4 Mistaking “Shadows for Gods”: Class and the Christ Novel in the Progressive Era
• 5 “Christianity Incorporated”: Sinclair Lewis and the Taylorization of American Protestantism
• 6 ­Gastonia Revisited: Religion, Literature, and the Loray Mill Strike of 1929
• 7 “The Blackness of God”: Race and Religion in the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
• Works Cited
• Index