| This dissertation explores the relationship between American evangelical culture and the print market during the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than eschewing the world of print as corrupting, evangelical publishers, booksellers, writers, and readers entered the world in order to transform it. I work through the multiple meanings of "American evangelical culture," recognizing its permeable boundaries and evangelicals' appropriation of elements from European and non-evangelical sources.;I draw on histories of the book trades, writing, reading, and religion, employing literary analysis to consider textual transmission, authorship, and language. I discuss a broad range of printed texts, including memoirs, hymns, periodicals, Sunday-school books, sermons, novels, and gift-books. I treat text and context: the embodiment of texts as material artifacts and commercial wares, and relationships with other strategies used to build and sustain churches.;Bracketing secularization narratives, I ask how evangelicals used profane resources for sacred purposes. I explore several dialectics: evangelical and denominational unity and competition, tradition and adaptation to change, domestic and institutional religion, clerical authority and a lay "priesthood of all believers," professional arbitration and choices by practitioners.;Chapter one considers strategies employed by extra-denominational, denominational, and lay publishers and booksellers who inhabited evangelicalism and the book trades, and appraises the tension-filled relationship between spiritual and market value.;Chapter two surveys the universe of print artifacts and asks how readers and writers used texts to "do good," or exert a spiritual influence. It identifies marks of membership in an informal, fluid evangelical canon, distinguishes varieties of "usefulness" of diverse genres, and analyzes how professional arbiters regulated practices.;Chapter three assesses how periodicals shaped evangelical and denominational identities: forging communication networks; developing a textual community that overlapped with local church communities; opening limited opportunities for public expression by women and African-Americans; promoting "truth" and refuting "error.";Chapter four evaluates how hymns set apart particular times and spaces as "sacred" in order to frame all of life as redemption history. Cultural mediators---editors, compilers, and translators---shaped meaning by framing, selecting, altering, and organizing hymns. Anglo-American and African-American practitioners balanced the alternatives of oral and print, vernacular and refined, profane and sacred language. |
