Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature Book

Acknowledgments ix

INTRODUCTION 1

PART ONE: Protestantism and the Social Space of Reading 13

CHAPTER ONE: Legible Dominion: Puritanism's New World Narrative 15
CHAPTER TWO: Protestant Expansion, Indian Violence, and Childhood Death: The New England Primer 34
CHAPTER THREE: From Disestablishment to "Consensus": The Nineteenth-Century Bible Wars and the Limits of Dissent 60
CHAPTER FOUR: Conversion to Democracy: Religion and the American Renaissance 84

PART TWO: Secular Fictions 109

CHAPTER FIVE: From Romanism to Race: Uncle Tom's Cabin 111
CHAPTER SIX: Mark Twain and the Ambivalent Refuge of Unbelief 137
CHAPTER SEVEN: Secularism, Feminism, Imperialism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Progress Narrative of U.S. Feminism 161
CHAPTER EIGHT: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Catholic Closet 181

AFTERWORD: American Religion and the Future of Dissent 213

Notes 219
Bibliography 289
Index 323