Works of the Spirit: American literatures and religious cultures, 1771-1797.

摘要

This dissertation investigates the role of the "Spirit" in the eighteenth-century advent of literary production by Native Americans, African-Americans, and indentured servants. Writers like Samson Occom, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant came into literacy, literary status, and contact with each other through trans-Atlantic evangelical networks. Their works instate the Spirit as an effective cultural currency and as the basis for a vernacular hermeneutics.;Conventional accounts of early American intellectual history sometimes correlate the death of Jonathan Edwards with the birth of normative secularism. Emergent literatures of this period attest to the continuing significance of religion and religious association for communities not served by the logic of the American Enlightenment or enfranchised by early national politics. A ministerial calling redeemed Quaker Jane Hoskens from indentured servitude; her Life and Spiritual Sufferings (1771) is the first published autobiography by an American woman of the working class. John Marrant's Journal (1790) records the extended workings of providence in the life of the African-American evangelist, beyond the exemplary ending of his famous conversion Narrative (1785) to the details of his mission among displaced Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia. Marrant later joined Prince Hall's African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston. In three speeches delivered to the Lodge, Marrant and Hall forged from remnants of Kabbalism and Occultism a prophetic vision of Black political destiny. Mohegan minister Samson Occom compiled his own writings with those of Watts, Herbert, and Wesley to form A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774); Occom's hymnody of exodus accompanied displaced tribes' settlement of a new pan-tribal community at Brotherton, New York.;This genealogical study of recently recovered and repopularized texts discloses rich connections between religious experience and literary production in late-eighteenth century America. It also addresses a stumbling block common to critical treatments of this body of writing: the assumption that religion must be read as a mark of colonialist control. My research suggests a more complicated, more promising possibility, a picture of early American cultures reconstituted and revitalized in religious discourse.