Focusing primarily on non-canonical texts, this collection takes up the diversity of religious discourse in nineteenth-century women's literature and articulates how American women writers adopted the language of religious sentiment for their own cultural, political or spiritual ends. The contributors examine fiction, political and religious writings, memoirs, and poetry to reveal the complexities of lived religion in women's culture-both its repressive and its revolutionary potential --
Cover; Contents; Notes on Contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 Renegade Religious: Performativity, Female Identity, and the Antebellum Convent-Escape Narrative; 2 Shaping Narrative: Julia A.J. Foote's Theology of Holiness; 3 Composing Radical Lives: Women as Autonomous Religious Seekers and Nineteenth-Century Memoirs; 4 "Come Right Down With Me": Poverty, Agency, and Incarnational Reading in the Work of Rebecca Harding Davis; 5 Religious Popular Culture and the Critique of Romantic Racialism in Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig
6 "One [Hermaphroditic] Angel": Swedenborg, Gender Complementarity, and Divine Love in Julia Ward Howe's The Hermaphrodite7 "The Grace of God Assisting": Abolitionist Women and the Politics of Religion; 8 "A Religion of Their Own": Louisa May Alcott's New American Religion; 9 "A startling reform": Women and Christianity in the Work of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; 10 The Puritan Roots of Sarah Piatt's Feminist Materialism; Works Cited; Index
