| America's early national years witnessed the rise of both a burgeoning print culture and an aggressively expanding evangelical culture. This dissertation examines the confluence of those two currents by focusing on "personal religious narratives" published in religious books, periodicals, and tracts from 1790 to 1825. It draws primarily on those narratives published or distributed in Pennsylvania. The genre of personal religious narratives encompasses the traditional (and much-studied) conversion narratives, as well as the enormously popular (and far less analyzed) deathbed narratives. Some of the stories are autobiographical, some biographical. Some give an entire life history, while others are brief anecdotes. Though diverse, the narratives examined have one thing in common: all describe the spiritual experiences of actual people.;This study brings together religious history and "history of the book" methodologies, a combination that opens a window into popular religious experience in America's early national period. The era was marked by revivalistic excitement and the rapid expansion of religious print. The exploration of printed religious narratives shows that lay persons--women and men of all ranks, races, and ages--served as subjects, authors, and distributors of such literature, and thus played an integral role in the fostering of that religious excitement and print expansion. The study argues that through their involvement in creating and disseminating religious narratives, lay persons helped shape a popular, interdenominational, evangelical culture in nineteenth-century America.;After exploring the authorship, content, and distribution of personal religious narratives, the final section of the study probes readers' responses to this evangelical literature, and argues that the narratives were read for a number of purposes. They served as devotional exercises, of course, and in that capacity created a canon of Protestant heroes and heroines for an ever-growing reading audience. They also were read for entertainment, however, and as entertainment they helped shape an audience for (and perhaps the content of) the "sentimental" and morally didactic religious fiction of the next generation. |
