Gotowa bibliografia na temat „Protestant romanticism”

MADAME DE STAËL AND THE “UNIVERSAL RELIGIONˮThe object of the article is the idea of a universal religion formulated by Madame de Staël in her book De l’Allemagne in 1813. In order to grasp the meaning of this idea, we have to consider first the religious identity of the author, then sketch the philosophical and religious context in which the idea has developed, and present Madame de Staël’s worldview, inspired by Enlightenment phi­losophy and Protestant thought as well as mystical and esoteric sources popular among German philosophers of nature. In the broader context of the development of the idea of a universal religion, the work of the French pioneer of Romanticism, in which the idea, associated with the feeling of infinity, is conceived as a worship exercised by the whole universe having his temple in the human heart, occupies an important place at the intersection of the 18th and the 19th century.

On 4 March 1554 some hundreds of London schoolboys fought a mock battle on Finsbury Field outside the northern wall of the city. Boys have always gratified their innate romanticism by playing at war, yet this incident, organized between several schools, was overtly political and implicitly religious in character. It almost resulted in tragedy, and, though scarcely noticed by historians, it does not fail to throw Ught upon London society and opinion during a major crisis of Tudor history. The present essay aims to discuss the factual evidence and its sources; thereafter to clarify the broader context and significance of the affair by briefer reference to a few comparable events which marked the Reformation struggle elsewhere. The London battle relates closely to two events in the reign of Mary Tudor: her marriage with Philip of Spain and the dangerous Kentish rebellion led by the younger Sir Thomas Wyatt. The latter’s objectives were to seize the government, prevent the marriage, and, in all probability, to place the Princess Elizabeth on the throne as the figurehead of a Protestant regime in Church and State. While Wyatt himself showed few signs of evangelical piety, the notion of a merely political revolt can no longer be maintained. Professor Malcolm R. Thorp has recendy examined in detail the lives of all the numerous known leaders, and has proved that in almost every case they display clear records of Protestant conviction. It is, moreover, common knowledge that Kent, with its exceptionally large Protestant population, provided at this moment the best possible recruiting-area in England for an attack upon the Catholic government. Though the London militia treasonably went over to Wyatt, the magnates with their retinues and associates rallied around the legal sovereign. Denied boats and bridges near the capital, Wyatt finally crossed the Thames at Kingston, but then failed to enter London from the west. By 8 February 1554 his movement had collapsed, though his execution did not occur until 11 April.

Many years ago John Higham identified a transition in American culture “from boundlessness to consolidation,” the beginnings of which could be traced to the 1850s. Among indications of a scaling back in the prevailing sense of unlimited openness were an incipient shift from romanticism to realism in the arts, and a movement toward tighter organization and centralization, often associated with the Civil War, which was already discernible in the prewar decade. In describing this shift, Higham said little about religion, observing only that the growth of professionalism reduced competition among Protestant denominations and “produced a more highly trained ministry, greater concern with the liturgical side of religion, and a decline of the crusading fervor of an earlier day.” Although he made no mention of American Catholicism, the concept of “boundlessness” seems sufficiently capacious to apply to the pioneering decades of Catholic development, and by midcentury a process of consolidation was definitely under way in that dimension of the national culture. My aim in this essay is to look more closely at boundlessness in one area of Catholic life and to call attention to a generational shift in outlook that accompanied the process of consolidation.

This paper addresses travelogues by English author Mary Holderness who spent the years 1816–1820 in the settlement of Karagoz in the Crimean Peninsula. Scholarship has used this source but rarely, mostly for cultural-anthropological facts. This paper provides an integral analysis of these travel writings as the most detailed account of Crimean ethno-confessional communes from the period. The works by Holderness are studied in the context of contemporary Western knowledge of the Crimea and specific ethnographic ideas in early Romanticism. The “involved observer’s” experience allowed Holderness to collect unique information about the economy and ethnography of the country. The source provides various accounts on the economic activities and taxation specificities, traditional costumes and cuisine, matrimonial relations and funeral rituals, entertainment and superstitions, religion, and other features of Crimean Russians and Tatars, Greeks and Germans, Bulgarians and Armenians, Karaites, and other ethnocultural communities. These materials allow one to disclose the features of the British perception of other peoples. Thus, foreigners tended to generalisation and typisation, making conclusions about the general trends of the national character relying on a few cases known to them from their own experience. The traveller put her fellow countrymen at the top of the “stairs of peoples” going from “barbarism” to “civilization,” while Crimean ethno-confessional communes occupied the stairs below them. She “supplied” them with various combinations of such features as primitive religiosity and superstitions, bad morals and disinclination to work according to Protestant ethics, laziness and stealing combined with a good heart, hospitality, empathy, etc.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche pointed out that the classical German Philosophy was the expression of a covert Theology. In fact, from Lessing to Hegel, through Kant, trough the Idealists and the Romantics, German philosophers and thinkers studied in protestant schools and seminaries, for the most part, of pietist orientation. This article shows the general characteristics of pietism and how it influenced the problems statement, the doctrines and ideas of some of these philosophers.

La tesis fundamental de los Discursos a la nación alemana (1807-1808) de Fichte reza del modo siguiente: sola la educación puede salvar a la nación. Este texto se propone indagar sobre las razones históricas, políticas, sociales e ideológicas más importantes que pudieron llevar al reconocido filósofo alemán a formular tan inquietante afirmación. Abarca, grosso modo, desde la época de la Reforma protestante hasta la disolución del Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico (llegada de Napoleón). Tal análisis permitirá, además, comprender cuál fue el contexto social general que dio lugar al surgimiento de movimientos tan reconocidos como la Ilustración (Aufklärung), el Clasicismo, el Romanticismo y el Idealismo alemanes, para los cuales -caso de Fichte-, tuvo la educación y la formación de los individuos un papel fundamental que cumplir en y para la sociedad.

The objectives of the research. The article is devoted to the study of the main parameters of the Marian theme embodiment in the art of music, with highlighting the aspects of history and genre stylistics. It is noted that the choice of the topic is related to the study of the works by the Kharkiv composer of Polish origin Konstanty Antoni Gorski, who worked in Kharkiv for many years (1880–1910) and belongs to the founders of his academic musical culture. The article lays the methodological basis for studying interpretation of the Marian theme in the works by this author, for that the analysis of the relevant sources (theological, musicological, etc.) has been carried out to derive the genre-stylistic classifications for this phenomenon (confessional, genre, national classifications). The results of the study. It is noted that the Marian theme in music can be classified as one of its central themes. This is due to the general ethical and natural content of the European music of the academic layer, which itself, as it is known, originated from the Church music and retained the features of high contemplation inherent in the cult genres, which determined the prospect line for the subsequent development of the Christian world music. The study emphasizes that the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary acts as a part and an important component of the New Testament, where two her main hypostases are presented. The Virgin Mary is honored and praised, firstly, as the Mother of the Son of God, who experienced suffering with him for the good of humanity, and secondly, as the intercessor and guardian of people who believe in her divine power and destiny. Here, the two interpretations of the Blessed Virgin’s image should be borne in mind, which are implemented at the confessional level – in the Catholic and Orthodox liturgical service. The whole branch of knowledge, called Mariology, is devoted to the study of these issues in the European theology and art history. The musical aspects of this field, presented in the monograph by O. Nemkova (2013), are closely related to religious teachings, as well as to their secular reflection at the level of the genre, style and stylistics of the musical works. The musical interpretation of the Blessed Virgin’s image, coming from Catholicism is based on the postulates of Her Divine destiny, which is reflected in the canonical texts in Latin, among which two main ones stand out – “Stabat Mater” and “Salve Regina”. These texts are realized in the cantata genre, the basis of which is the style of da chiesa, that is, the concerto itself in the church that accompanies the service in honor of Virgin Mary. The latter takes place in such holidays: Conception of Mary by Her mother Anna, Nativity of Mary, Presentation of Mary, Annunciation, Dormition of the Mother of God. The prayer “Ave Maria” is also very popular, and it has become for many European authors the basis of both applied religious and secular works, an example of which is the music of Early Baroque, Romanticism and Modern times. The secularization processes that began in the music of the Christian world on the turn of the Late Renaissance and Baroque (the watershed here is the 1600 year, the official year of the opera genre birth), called to life two groups of works on Marian themes: 1) the compositions nearby to the canonical original, as a rule, Latin texts (they were distributed among Catholics by religion and in Catholic countries); 2) the works modified, based on translations and free narrations of canonical texts given in the national languages and in suitable stylistics of one or another national culture (this is characteristic of Protestantism, as well as of Orthodoxy). There is also a deep line of interpretation of the Blessed Virgin’s image, personifying the eternal idea of motherhood and femininity, which is equally characteristic of many national musical cultures, in particular, the non-religious wave that manifested itself in Slavic music, first at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries, and then – during the last two decades of the 20th century. It is noted that Gorski, remaining a devout Catholic by the nature of his activity in such interfaith cultural center as Kharkiv in the late 19th – the first two decades of the 20th centuries, embodied in his work the traditions and demands coming from the Polish (Catholic) as well as the Ukrainian (Orthodox) and French and German (Lutheran, Protestant) musical cultures. On this basis, three of his opuses devoted to Virgin Mary arose: the Catholic cantata “Salve Regina” (for voice, violin and organ), the concerto-cantata in French “Salutation a la Sainte Vierge” (for soprano accompanied by choir, organ, string quintet and two French horns), and the choral concerto for the Orthodox mixed choir “Zriaszcze mia bezglasna” on the Old Slavonic text. Each of these works is a special genre form, with which Gorski works as with a standard model equipped with a lexical layer of a certain musical stylistics, primarily national. The Polish song and romanza sources are traced in the first of the works, along with the obvious influence of the opera arias. In the cantata on the French text, echoes of not only opera scenes are heard, but also the elements of the programme music, story-telling, characteristic of French musical style. Finally, the Orthodox choral Concerto on the Old Slavonic text demonstrates the typical genre of the Ukrainian music – the large form intended for collective choral performance that was the equivalent of a symphony in the Western European musical culture. Conclusion. It is proved that, guided by the world experience, Konstanty Antoni Gorski embodies all these models in three Marian works – the canonical church cantata, the larger-scale secular cantata, the a cappella choral concerto, while remaining a composer with original and unique intonational thinking. Gorski in these three compositions appears as a neoclassic, subordinating the original genres to his own creative intentions, which makes the music of these compositions comprehensible and accessible to a wide audience. It was that for the purpose to popularize the opuses by Gorski this article has been written.

This essay begins by offering some observations about how holiness was comprehended andexpressed in Victorian and Edwardian England. In addition to the ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentiment’that characterised society, notions of holiness were shaped by, and developed in reaction to, dominant philosophical movements; notably, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. It thenconsiders how these notions found varying religious expression in four Protestant traditions – he Oxford Movement, Calvinism, Wesleyanism, and the Early Keswick movement. Injuxtaposition to what was most often considered to be a negative expression of holinessassociated primarily with anthropocentric and anthroposocial behaviour as evidenced in thesetraditions, the essay concludes by examining one – namely, P.T. Forsyth – whose voice calledfrom within the ecclesial community for a radical requisition of holiness language as afundamentally positive reality describing the divine life and divine activity. The relevance of astudy of the Church’s understanding of holiness and how it sought to develop its doctrinewhile engaging with larger social and philosophical shifts endure with us still.

In January of 1908 H. Addington Bruce, a writer for the North American Review, observed that "On every street, at every corner, we meet the neurasthenics" (qtd. in Lears, 50). "Discovered" by the neurologist George M. Beard in 1880, neurasthenia was a nervous disorder characterized by a "lack of nerve force" and comprised of a host of neuroses clustered around an overall paralysis of the will. Historian Barbara Will notes that there were "thousands of men and women at the turn of the century who claimed to be ‘neurasthenics,’" among them Theodore Roosevelt, Edith Wharton, William and Henry James, and Beard himself. These neurasthenics had free roam over the American psychiatric landscape from the date of Beard’s diagnosis until the 1920s, when more accurate diagnostic tools began to subdivide the nearly uninterpretably wide variety of symptoms falling under the rubric of "neurasthenic." By then, however, nearly every educated American had suffered from (or known someone who had) the debilitating "disease"--including Willa Cather, who in The Professor’s House would challenge her readers to acknowledge and engage with the cultural phenomenon of neurasthenia. Cultural historian T.J. Jackson Lears, long a student of neurasthenia, defines it as an "immobilizing, self-punishing depression" stemming from "endless self-analysis" and "morbid introspection" (47, 49). What is especially interesting about the disease, for Lears and other scholars, is that it is a culture-bound syndrome, predicated not upon individual experience, but upon the cultural and economic forces at play during the late nineteenth century. Barbara Will writes that neurasthenia was "double-edged": "a debilitating disease and [...] the very condition of the modern American subject" (88). Interestingly, George Beard attributed neurasthenia to the changes wracking his culture: Neurasthenia is the direct result of the five great changes of modernity: steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women. (qtd. in Will, 94) For Beard, neurasthenia was a peculiarly modern disease, the result of industrialization and of the ever-quickening pace of commercial and intellectual life. Jackson Lears takes Beard’s attribution a step further, explaining that "as larger frameworks of meaning weakened, introspection focused on the self alone and became ‘morbid’" (49). These frameworks of meaning--religious, political, psychosexual--were under steady assault in Beard’s time from commodifying and secularizing movements in America. Self-scrutiny, formerly yoked to Protestant salvation (and guilt), became more insular and isolating, resulting in the ultimate modern malady, neurasthenia. While Willa Cather may have inherited Beard’s and her culture’s assumptions of illness, it ultimately appears that Cather’s depiction of neurasthenia is a highly vexed one, both sympathetic and troubled, reflecting a deep knowledge of the condition and an ongoing struggle with the rationalization of scientific psychology. As an intellectual, she was uniquely positioned to both suffer from the forces shaping the new disease and to study them with a critical eye. Godfrey St. Peter, the anxious protagonist of The Professor’s House, becomes then a character that readers of Cather’s day would recognize as a neurasthenic: a "brain-worker," hard-charging and introspective, and lacking in what Beard would call "nerve force," the psychological stoutness needed to withstand modernity’s assault on the self. Moreover, St. Peter is not a lone sufferer, but is instead emblematic of a culture-wide affliction--part of a larger polity constantly driven to newer heights of production, consumption, and subsequent affliction. Jackson Lears theorizes that "neurasthenia was a product of overcivilization" (51), of consumer culture and endemic commodification. Beard himself characterized neurasthenia as an "American disease," a malady integral to the rationalizing, industrializing American economy (31). Cather reinforces the neurasthenic’s exhaustion and inadequacy as St. Peter comes across his wife flirting with Louis Marsellus, prompting the professor to wonder, "Beaux-fils, apparently, were meant by Providence to take the husband’s place when husbands had ceased to be lovers" (160). Not only does this point to the sexual inadequacy and listlessness characteristic of neurasthenia, but the diction here reinforces the modus operandi of the commodity culture--when an old model is used up, it is simply replaced by a newer, better model. Interestingly, Cather’s language itself often mirrors Beard’s. St. Peter at one point exclaims to Lillian, in a beatific reverie: "I was thinking [...] about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer, at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him" (156). The Professor’s "symptom of hopelessness," Beard might explain, "appears to be similar to that of morbid fear--an instinctive consciousness of inadequacy for the task before us. We are hopeless because our nerve force is so reduced that the mere holding on to life seems to be a burden too heavy for us" (49). Both Beard and Cather, then, zero in on the crushing weight of modern life for the neurasthenic. The Professor here aches for rest and isolation--he, in Beard’s language, "fears society," prompting Lillian to fear that he is "’becoming lonely and inhuman’" (162). This neurasthenic craving for isolation becomes much more profound in Book III of the novel, when St. Peter is almost completely estranged from his family. Although he feels he loves them, he "could not live with his family again" upon their return from Europe (274). "Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed" (275). St. Peter’s estrangement is not only with his family (an estrangement perhaps rationalized by the grasping or otherwise distasteful St. Peter clan), but with the human family. It is a solipsistic retreat from contact and effort, the neurasthenic’s revulsion for work of any kind. Neurasthenia, if left untreated, can become deadly. Beard explains: "A certain amount of nerve strength is necessary to supply the courage requisite for simple existence. Abstaining from dying demands a degree of force" (49). Compare this to the scene near the end of the narrative in which St. Peter, sleeping on the couch, nearly dies: When St. Peter at last awoke, the room was pitch-black and full of gas. He was cold and numb, felt sick and rather dazed. The long-anticipated coincidence had happened, he realized. The storm had blown the stove out and the window shut. The thing to do was to get up and open the window. But suppose he did not get up--? How far was a man required to exert himself against accident? [...] He hadn’t lifted his hand against himself--was he required to lift it for himself? (276) This classic scene, variously read as a suicide attempt or as an accident, can be understood as the neurasthenic’s complete collapse. The Professor’s decision is made solely in terms of effort; this is not a moral or philosophical decision, but one of physiological capacity. He is unwilling to "exert" the energy necessary to save himself, unwilling to "lift his hand" either for or against himself. Here is the prototypical neurasthenic fatigue--almost suicidal, but ultimately too passive and weak to even take that course of action. Accidental gassing is a supremely logical death for the neurasthenic. This appropriateness is reinforced by the Professor at the end of the narrative, when he remembers his near death: Yet when he was confronted by accidental extinction, he had felt no will to resist, but had let chance take its way, as it had done with him so often. He did not remember springing up from the couch, though he did remember a crisis, a moment of acute, agonized strangulation. (282) Again, the Professor is a passive figure, couch-ridden, subject to the whims of chance and his own lack of nerve. He is saved by Augusta, though, and does somehow manage to carry on with his life, if in a diminished way. We cannot accredit his survival to clinical treatment of neurasthenia, but perhaps his vicarious experience on the mesa with Tom Outland can account for his fortitude. Treatment of neurasthenia, according to Tom Lutz, "aimed at a reconstitution of the subject in terms of gender roles" (32). S. Weir Mitchell, a leading psychiatrist of the day, treated many notable neurasthenics. Female patients, in line with turn-of-the-century models of female decorum, were prescribed bed rest for up to several months, and were prohibited from all activity and visitors. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper" has long been considered a critique of Mitchell’s "rest cure" for women. Interestingly, St. Peter’s old study has yellow wall paper.) Treatments for men, again consistent with contemporary gender roles, emphasized vigorous exercise, often in natural settings: Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Eakins, Frederic Remington, and Owen Wister were all sent to the Dakotas for rough-riding exercise cures [...] Henry James was sent to hike in the Alps, and William James continued to prescribe vigorous mountain hikes for himself[.] (32) Depleted of "nerve force," male neurasthenics were admonished to replenish their reserves in rugged, survivalist outdoor settings. Beard documents the treatment of one "Mr. O," whom, worn out by "labor necessitated by scholarly pursuits," is afflicted by a settled melancholia, associated with a morbid and utterly baseless fear of financial ruin...he was as easily exhausted physically as mentally. He possessed no reserve force, and gave out utterly whenever he attempted to overstep the bounds of the most ordinary effort. [As part of his treatment] He journeyed to the West, visited the Yellowstone region, and at San Francisco took steamer for China [...] and returned a well man, nor has he since relapsed into his former condition. (139-41) Beard’s characterization of "Mr. O" is fascinating in several ways. First, he is the prototypical neurasthenic--worn out, depressed, full of "baseless" fears. More interestingly, for the purposes of this study, part of the patient’s cure is effected in the "Yellowstone region," which would ultimately be made a national park by neurasthenic outdoors man Theodore Roosevelt. This natural space, hewn from the wilds of the American frontier, is a prototypical refuge for nervous "brain-workers" in need of rejuvenation. This approach to treatment is especially intriguing given the setting of Book II of The Professor's House: an isolated Mesa in the Southwest. While St. Peter himself doesn’t undertake an exercise cure, "Tom Outland’s Story" does mimic the form and rhetoric of treatment for male neurasthenics, possibly accounting for the odd narrative structure of the novel. Cather, then, not only acknowledges the cultural phenomenon of neurasthenia, but incorporates it in the structure of the text. Outland’s experience on the mesa (mediated, we must remember, by the neurasthenic St. Peter, who relates the tale) is consistent with what Jackson Lears has termed the "cult of strenuousity" prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. According to Lears neurasthenics often sought refuge in "a vitalistic cult of energy and process; and a parallel recovery of the primal, irrational sources in the human psyche, forces which had been obscured by the evasive banality of modern culture" (57). Outland, discovering the mesa valley for the first time, explains that the air there "made my mouth and nostrils smart like charged water, seemed to go to my head a little and produce a kind of exaltation" (200). Like Roosevelt and other devotees of the exercise cure, Outland (and St. Peter, via the mediation) is re-"charged" by the primal essence of the mesa. The Professor later laments, "his great drawback was [...] the fact that he had not spent his youth in the great dazzling South-west country which was the scene of his explorers’ adventures" (258). Interestingly, Outland’s rejuvenation on the mesa is cast by Cather in hyperbolically masculine terms. The notoriously phallic central tower of the cliff city, for instance, may serve as a metaphor for recovered sexual potency: It was beautifully proportioned, that tower, swelling out to a larger girth a little above the base, then growing slender again. There was something symmetrical and powerful about the swell of the masonry. The tower was the fine thing that held all the jumble of houses together and made them mean something. It was red in color, even on that grey day. (201) Neurasthenics embraced "premodern symbols as alternatives to the vagueness of liberal Protestantism or the sterility of nineteenth-century positivism" (Lears xiii). The tower stands in striking contrast to St. Peter’s sexless marriage with Lillian, potentially reviving the Professor’s sagging neurasthenic libido. The tower also serves, in Outland’s mind, to forge meaning out of the seemingly random cluster of houses: "The notion struck me like a rifle ball that this mesa had once been like a bee-hive; it was full of little cluff-hung villages, it had been the home of a powerful tribe" (202). Outland’s discovery, cast in martial terms ("rifle ball"), reinscribes the imperialistic tendencies of the exercise cure and of Tom’s archeological endeavor itself. Tom Lutz notes that the exercise cure, steeped in Rooseveltian rhetoric, exemplified "a polemic for cultural change, a retraining, presented as a ‘return’ to heroic, natural, and manly values...The paternalism of Roosevelt’s appeal made sense against the same understanding of role which informed the cures for neurasthenia" (36). Outland seems to unconsciously concur, reflecting that "Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality, is a sacred spot" (220-1). While Outland does have genuine admiration for the tribe, his language is almost always couched in terms of martial struggle, of striving against implacable odds. On a related note, George Kennan, writing in a 1908 McClure’s Magazine edited by Cather, proposed that rising suicide rates among the educated by cured by a "cultivation of what may be called the heroic spirit" (228). Cather was surely aware of this masculinizing, imperializing response to neurasthenic ennui--her poem, "Prairie Dawn," appears at the end of Kennan’s article! Outland’s excavation of Cliff City and its remains subsequently becomes an imperializing gesture, in spite of his respect for the culture. What does this mean, though, for a neurasthenic reading of The Professor’s House? In part, it acknowledges Cather’s response to and incorporation of a cultural phenomenon into the text in question. Additionally, it serves to clarify Cather’s critique of masculinist American culture and of the gendered treatment of neurasthenia. This critique is exemplified by Cather’s depiction of "Mother Eve": "Her mouth was open as if she were screaming, and her face, through all those years, had kept a look of terrible agony" (214-15). Not only does this harrowing image undermine Outland’s romantic depiction of the tribe, but it points to the moral bankruptcy of the cult of strenuousity. It is easy, Cather seems to argue, for Roosevelt and his ilk to "rough it" in the wilderness to regain their vigor, but the "real-life" wilderness experience is a far harsher and more dangerous prospect. Cather ultimately does not romanticize the mesa--she problematizes it as a site for neurasthenic recovery. More importantly, this vexed reading of the treatment suggests a vexed reading of neurasthenia and of "American Nervousness" itself. Ultimately, in spite of his best efforts to recover the intense experience of his past and of Tom Outland’s, St. Peter fails. As Mathias Schubnell explains, Cather’s "central character is trapped between a modern urban civilization to which he belongs against his will, and a pastoral, earth-bound world he yearns for but cannot regain" (97). This paradox is exemplified by the Professor’s early lament to Lillian, "’it’s been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young’" (94). The reader, of course, recognizes the absurdity of this image--an absurdity strongly reinforced by the image of the deceased "Mother Eve" figure. These overcivilized men, Cather suggests, have no conception of what intense experience might be. That experience has been replaced, the Professor explains, by rationalizing, industrializing forces in American culture: Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures...nor any new sins--not one! Indeed, it has taken our old ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin...I don’t think you help people by making their conduct of no importance--you impoverish them. (68) St. Peter, the neurasthenic humanist, gets here at the heart of his (and America’s) sickness--it has replaced the numinous and the sacred with the banal and the profane. The disorder he suffers from, once termed a sin, has become "physiological," as has his soul. It is worthwhile to contrast the Professor’s lament with Beard’s supremely rational boast: "It would seem, indeed, that diseases which are here described represent a certain amount of force in the body which, if our knowledge of physiological chemistry were more precise, might be measured in units" (115). The banal, utterly practical measuring of depression, of melancholia, of humanity’s every whim and caprice, Cather suggests, has dulled the luster of human existence. The Professor’s tub, then, becomes an emblem of the relentless stripping away of all that is meaningful and real in Cather’s culture: "Many a night, after blowing out his study lamp, he had leaped into that tub, clad in his pyjamas, to give it another coat of some one of the many paints that were advertised to behave like porcelain, but didn’t" (12). Porcelain here becomes the religion or art which once sustained the race, replaced by the false claims of science. The Professor, though, seems too world-weary, too embittered to actually turn to religious faith. Perhaps God is dead in his world, eliminated by the Faustian quest for scientific knowledge. "His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him" (264). Godfrey St. Peter, like the rest of the neurasthenics, is doomed to an incurable sickness, victim of a spiritual epidemic which, Cather suggests, will not soon run its course. References Beard, George M. A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia). A. D. Rockwell, ed. New York: E.B. Treat & Company, 1905. Cather, Willa. The Professor’s House. London: Virago, 1981. Fisher-Wirth, Ann. "Dispossession and Redemption in the Novels of Willa Cather." Cather Studies 1 (1990): 36-54. Harvey, Sally Peltier. Predefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather. Toronto: Associated UP, 1995. Hilgart, John. "Death Comes for the Aesthete: Commodity Culture and the Artifact in Cather’s The Professor’s House." Studies in the Novel 30:3 (Fall 1998): 377-404. Kennan, George. McClure’s Magazine 30:2 (June 1908): 218-228. Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation American Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. Lutz, Tom. American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Schubnell, Matthias. "The Decline of America: Willa Cather’s Spenglerian Vision in The Professor’s House." Cather Studies 2 (1993): 92-117. Stouck, David. "Willa Cather and The Professor’s House: ‘Letting Go with the Heart." Western American Literature 7 (1972): 13-24. Will, Barbara. "Nervous Systems, 1880-1915." American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique. Tim Armstrong, ed. New York: NYUP, 1996. 86-100. Links The Willa Cather Electronic Archive The Mower's Tree (Cather Colloquium Newsletter) George Beard information

Although the ‘death of God’ theology attracted considerable attention during the 1960s, in recent decades it has fallen into neglect. Nonetheless, the issues raised by the ‘death of God’ theology were important ones and it remains an interesting question whether the ‘death of God’ theologians were able to make substantial contributions to them. This thesis re-examines the work of the ‘death of God’ theologians. It argues that the popular view – that the ‘death of God’ theology represented a common tendency, or movement, towards atheism among certain prominent American Protestant theologians – is mistaken. Through a series of detailed studies of Thomas J.J. Altizer (chapters 3 and 4), William Hamilton (Chapter 5), Paul van Buren (Chapter 6), and Harvey Cox (Chapter 7), the thesis shows not only that the significance of the ‘death of God’ theologians has been widely misinterpreted, but that their work contains a number of features which have been under-emphasised or even overlooked. The aim of the thesis is to provide a more balanced contemporary reading of their work. The work of Altizer receives special attention and a case is made for the view that he should be read as a Protestant mystic of a peculiar sort.
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School of Theology
Arts, Education and Law
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Although the ‘death of God’ theology attracted considerable attention during the 1960s, in recent decades it has fallen into neglect. Nonetheless, the issues raised by the ‘death of God’ theology were important ones and it remains an interesting question whether the ‘death of God’ theologians were able to make substantial contributions to them. This thesis re-examines the work of the ‘death of God’ theologians. It argues that the popular view – that the ‘death of God’ theology represented a common tendency, or movement, towards atheism among certain prominent American Protestant theologians – is mistaken. Through a series of detailed studies of Thomas J.J. Altizer (chapters 3 and 4), William Hamilton (Chapter 5), Paul van Buren (Chapter 6), and Harvey Cox (Chapter 7), the thesis shows not only that the significance of the ‘death of God’ theologians has been widely misinterpreted, but that their work contains a number of features which have been under-emphasised or even overlooked. The aim of the thesis is to provide a more balanced contemporary reading of their work. The work of Altizer receives special attention and a case is made for the view that he should be read as a Protestant mystic of a peculiar sort.

This chapter explains that the movement that eventually came to be known as Romanticism had its origins in politicized canon-formation. A particular literary taste was developed by Whig writers as a reflection of commercial, Protestant, and constitutional values that was focused on the sublime, originality and creativity, the power of the imagination, and anti-classicism. These ‘cultures of Whiggism’ became increasingly influential and blossomed in the 1760s—most notably in the work of literary forgers such as Macpherson and Chatterton—by which time they had combined with equally political eighteenth-century reactions to the medieval past, most powerfully expressed through the cultural movement of the Gothic. Gothicism provided the new aesthetics with a progressive model of history and national identity, as well as with a lexicon of supernatural imagery. Ironically, then, Romanticism was a consequence of the literary agenda of establishment party politics.

This chapter re-examines the influence that John Bunyan exercised on some major figures of the Romantic period. It argues that while writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott are rightly remembered for their role in separating theological from realistic content in the reception history of The Pilgrim’s Progress, this should not be viewed as the totality of Romantic response to Bunyan’s work. The chapter examines how the Protestant conversion narrative was developed and altered by writers like Wordsworth and Scott, and the ways in which Blake and Coleridge in particular attended carefully to, and drew imaginative inspiration from, the specific details of soteriology in The Pilgrim’s Progress. The chapter argues that while the Romantic response to Bunyan was revisionary, it was more attentive to his beliefs than some of the commentary of the period—such as Coleridge’s notorious distinction between ‘conventicle’ and ‘Parnassus’—would suggest.

This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about a coming spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice. A range of authors agreed that poems can provide a foretaste of the afterlife, but they disagreed about what kind of future state the imagination should seek. The mortalist impulse-exemplified by John Milton and by Romantic poets Anna Letitia Barbauld and William Wordsworth-is to overcome the temptation of disembodiment and to restore spirit to its rightful home in matter. The spiritualist impulse-driving eighteenth-century verse by Mark Akenside, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Edward Young-is to break out of bodily repetition and enjoy the detached soul's freedom in advance. Although the study isolates these two tendencies, each needed the other as a source in the Enlightenment, and their productive opposition didn't end with Romanticism. The final chapter identifies an alternative Romantic vision that keeps open the possibility of a disembodied poetics, and the introduction considers present-day Anglophone writers who continue to put it to work.

This is a complete study of the works of the Irish playwright, travel writer, and poet J. M. Synge (1871–1909). A key and controversial figure in the Irish Literary Revival, and specifically in the Abbey Theatre, Synge’s career was short but dynamic. Moving from an early Romanticism, through Decadence, and on to a combative, protesting modernism, the development of Synge’s drama was propelled by his contentious relationship with the Irish politics of his time. This book is a full and timely reappraisal of Synge’s works, exploring both the prose and the drama through an in-depth study of Synge’s archive. Rather than looking at Synge’s work in relation to any distinct subject, this study examines Synge’s aesthetic and philosophical values, and charts the challenges posed to them as the impetus behind his reluctant movement into a more modernist mode of writing. Along the way, the book sheds new and often surprising light on Synge’s interests in occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, modernization, and even his late satirical engagement with eugenics. One of its key innovations is the use of Synge’s diaries, letters, and notebooks to trace his reading and to map the influences buried in his work, calling for them to be read afresh. Not only does this book reconsider each of Synge’s major works, along with many unfinished or archival pieces, it also explores the contested relationship between Revivalism and modernism, modernism and politics, and modernism and Romanticism.

Evangelicalism was the chief factor moulding the theology of most Protestant Dissenting traditions of the nineteenth century, dictating an emphasis on conversions, the cross, the Bible as the supreme source of teaching, and activism which spread the gospel while also relieving the needy. The chapter concentrates on debates about conversion and the cross. It begins by emphasizing that the Enlightenment and above all its principle of rational inquiry was enduringly important to Dissenters. The Enlightenment led some in the Reformed tradition such as Joseph Priestley to question not only creeds but also doctrines central to Christianity, such as the Trinity, while others, such as the Sandemanians, Scotch Baptists, Alexander Campbell’s Restorationists, or the Universalists, privileged the rational exegesis of Scripture over more emotive understandings of faith. In the Calvinist mainstream, though, the Enlightenment created ‘moderate Calvinism’. Beginning with Jonathan Edwards, it emphasized the moral responsibility of the sinner for rejecting the redemption that God had made available and reconciled predestination with the enlightened principle of liberty. As developed by Edwards’s successors, the New England theology became the norm in America and was widely disseminated among British Congregationalists and Baptists. It entailed a judicial or governmental conception of the atonement, in which a just Father was forced to exact the Son’s death for human sinfulness. The argument that this just sacrifice was sufficient to save all broke with the doctrine of the limited atonement and so pushed some higher Calvinists among the Baptists into schism, while, among Presbyterians, Princeton Seminary retained loyal to the doctrine of penal substitution. New England theology was not just resisted but also developed, with ‘New Haven’ theologians such as Nathaniel William Taylor stressing the human component of conversion. If Calvinism became residual in such hands, then Methodists and General and Freewill Baptists had never accepted it. Nonetheless they too gave enlightened accounts of salvation. The chapter dwells on key features of the Enlightenment legacy: a pragmatic attitude to denominational distinctions; an enduring emphasis on the evidences of the Christian faith; sympathy with science, which survived the advent of Darwin; and an optimistic postmillennialism in which material prosperity became the hallmark of the unfolding millennium. Initially challenges to this loose consensus came from premillennial teachers such as Edward Irving or John Nelson Darby, but the most sustained and deep-seated were posed by Romanticism. Romantic theologians such as James Martineau, Horace Bushnell, and Henry Ward Beecher rejected necessarian understandings of the universe and identified faith with interiority. They emphasized the love rather than the justice of God, with some such as the Baptist Samuel Cox embracing universalism. Late nineteenth-century Dissenters followed Anglicans in prioritizing the incarnation over the atonement and experiential over evidential apologetics. One final innovation was the adoption of Albrecht Ritschl’s claim that Jesus had come to found the kingdom of God, which boosted environmental social activism. The shift from Enlightenment to romanticism, which provoked considerable controversy, illustrated how the gospel and culture had been in creative interaction.

This chapter more broadly analyzes the universe of democratic transitions. It explains why we tend to romanticize democratic transitions like most romantic comedies glamorize love: The people gather in a central square, start protesting, topple the dictatorship, hold elections, and live happily ever after. It further discusses why the on-the-ground facts often fail to live up to this simple ideal, why history is littered with failed attempts to democratize, and why even successful democratic transitions are often painfully long and violent. Ideally, of course, it would be enlightened civilians—not military leaders—who would depose an authoritarian government and promote, in concert with civil society, the conditions necessary for democratic development. But in many cases, civilian institutions are unable or unwilling to enable democracy, leaving the military to take charge.

This chapter examines the results of Max Weber's American journey, particularly in terms of its impact on his work. It begins with a discussion of the popular discourse about America in German-speaking Europe, focusing on two views of which Weber was aware. On the one side were the inspiring romanticism and adventurous spirit of Karl May's depictions of the American frontier, and on the other side was the cultural criticism as expressed in Ferdinand Kürnberger's novella Der Amerika-Müde. The chapter then considers how the American experience influenced Weber's thinking in The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, with particular emphasis on his ruminations on the “Europeanization” of American life and the “Americanization” of European institutions. It also explores Weber's appropriation of American institutions and social practices in his work.