Author's Department/Program
English and American Literature
Language
English (en)
Date of Award
January 2011
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Chair and Committee
Sarah Rivett
Abstract
This dissertation argues that early American religious leaders and lay people developed philosophically complex linguistic theories as a result of a critically under-explored tension between text and religious experience. I investigate the inner workings of this dilemma across early American genres of religious experience--sermons, tracts, letters, diaries, ethnographies, and trials. Reading the plain style sermons of John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, and Thomas Hooker, Anne Hutchinson's trial, seventeenth-century Quaker language tracts, ethnographic and missionary texts about the seventeenth-century Native Americans, and the Great Awakening diaries edited by Jonathan Edwards I argue that while originating in an immaterial experience of the invisible world, religious experience had a material life in visible signs, in biblical types, and in material texts, which imagined language as rooted in the material world.
Recommended Citation
Spar, Natalie, "This Loquacious Soil: Language and Religious Experience in Early America" (2011). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 330.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/330
Comments
Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K7TD9VDZ