ECU Libraries Catalog

Awakening verse : the poetics of early American evangelicalism / Wendy Raphael Roberts.

Author/creator Roberts, Wendy Raphael
Other author/creatorOxford University Press.
Format Electronic and Book
Publication InfoNew York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020]
Descriptionxiv, 300 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Supplemental Content Full text available from Oxford Scholarship Online
Supplemental Content Full text available from Oxford Scholarship Online Religion
Subject(s)
Portion of title Poetics of early American evangelicalism
Contents Introduction: Revival Poetry -- Chapter One: "The Sound in Faith": The Calvinist Couplet and the Poetics of Espousal -- Chapter Two: "A Lady in New England": Forms of the Poet-Minister -- Chapter Three: Evangelical Harmony and the Discord of Taste -- Chapter Four: The Ethiop's Verse: The Limits of Poetic Capacity and Espousal Piety -- Chapter Five: A Revivalist Ars Poetica for an Itinerant Coterie: Evangelical Wit, Punctiliar Revision, and Poetic AddressConclusion: Conversions of Poetic History -- Appendix A: Revival Poets and Poetry -- Appendix B: Selected Verse.
Abstract "Beginning with Isaac Watts's Horae Lyricae (1706) and concluding with the burgeoning poetic print culture of the early nineteenth century Awakening Verse unfolds how evangelical ministers, itinerants, and lay people in colonial British North America capaciously engaged prevailing ideas about literary taste and created a distinct transatlantic poetics grounded in Watts's notion of the "plainest capacity." From the evangelical women who were instrumental in the development of bountiful verse ministries and the creation of poetic coteries to the itinerant ministers for whom poetics and its attendant sociability were central, evangelicals produced new forms of the "poet-minister" and "print itinerancy" that emerged as crucial practices of revivalism and facilitated rearrangements of ecclesiastical, gendered, and racialized authority. Well-known poet-ministers, such the Bostonian Sarah Moorhead and the Virginian James Ireland, reimagined formal poetic elements in the service of saving souls. Others, like Samuel Davies and Phillis Wheatley became enmeshed in critical debates over the racialization of evangelical verse. Countless others, in print and in manuscript, joined with Watts to save poetry from its "profligate" uses. Awakening Verse shows that American literary and religious histories that regularly exclude one hundred years of verse severely impoverish our understanding of early evangelicalism and American poetry. Taking revival poets and their verse as seriously as they and their contemporaries did provides an entirely new understanding of eighteenth-century evangelical and literary culture, one in which poetry serves as one of the primary actors in the creation, maintenance, and adaptation of evangelical culture and religious enthusiasm animates American poetics"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references (pages [235]-277) and index.
Access restrictionAvailable only to authorized users.
Technical detailsMode of access: World Wide Web
Genre/formElectronic books.
LCCN 2019058174
ISBN9780197510278 (hardback)
ISBN(epub)
ISBN(online)

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