Raphael

2020 · 7459 — <p>Oxford University Press 2020. 1st Edition . Hardcover. Fine/Fine. Hardcover xiv 300 pages b&w illustrations in text NOT ex-library. Book looks unread clean and bright throughout with unmarked text free of inscriptions and stamps firmly bound. In a likewise dust jacket. -- In 1740 Benjamin Franklin published the first American edition of Gospel Sonnets by the eminent Scottish Presbyterian minister Ralph Erskine. The work already in its fifth British edition quickly became an American bestseller and remained so throughout the eighteenth century. Franklin was aware of what most scholars of American religion and literature have forgotten -that poetry played a central role in the "surprising works of God" that birthed evangelicalism. The far-reaching social transformations precipitated by the transatlantic evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century depended upon the development of a major literary form that of revival poetry. Literary scholars and historians of religion have prioritized sermons conversion narratives periodicals and hymnody. Wendy Roberts here argues that poetry offered a unique capacity to "diffuse celestial Fervor through the World" in the words of the cleric Samuel Davies. Awakening Verse is the first monograph to address this large corpus of evangelical poetry in the American colonies shedding light on important dimensions of eighteenth-century religious and literary culture. Roberts deftly assembles a large previously unknown archive of immensely popular poems examines how literary history has rendered this poetic tradition invisible and demonstrates how a vibrant popular poetics exercised a substantial effect on the landscape of early American religion literature and culture. -- Contents: Introduction: Revival Poetry; 1. "The Sound in Faith": The Calvinist Couplet and the Poetics of Espousal Rubrics for Sound: High and Low; Poet-Minister and the Poetics of Espousal; Versified Convert and the Breaking of Form; 2. "A Lady in New England": Forms of the Poet-Minister Verse Ministries of Early Evangelical Women Idealized Convert and Muse; Spiritual Director and Woman Print Itinerant; "A New England Lady" as the Idealized Convert and Itinerant's Guide; "O that an equal zeal": The Legacy of Sarah Parsons Moorhead; 3. Evangelical Harmony and the Discord of Taste Evangelical Harmony and the Subtle Sublime; The Mad Black Poet-Minister and the 'No Language' of Revival; Harmony's Token; 4. Ethiop's Verse: The Limits of Poetic Capacity and Espousal Piety Evangelical Anthropology and Jefferson's Race Science; In the Line of Women Poet-Ministers; The Hymn Plainest Capacity and the Progress of Christian History; To Refuse Capacities of Religion and Science; 5. A Revivalist Ars Poetica for an Itinerant Coterie: Evangelical Wit Punctiliar Revision and Poetic Address Poetic Conversion; A Poetic Coterie of Itinerant Ministers; Coda: Conversion and Evangelical Poetic Address; Conclusion: Conversions of Poetic History; Appendix A: Selected Revival Poets and Poetry; Appendix B: Selected Verse Anne Dutton; Sarah Moorhead; Martha Brewster; Notes; Index <br /><br /></p> Oxford University Press hardcover