For Conscience' Sake: Dissent and the Divine in Early American Literature

by Sara Partridge

Overview

Drawing together an archive of early American figures who have theorized or mobilized the notion of the conscience in a significant and representative way, this book argues that the conscience played a pivotal role in discourses surrounding religious freedom, civil disobedience, and individual rights. Puritan dissenters such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, Quaker ministers like John Woolman and Elias Hicks, and antislavery orators including Frederick Douglass and Theodore Parker all construct radical ethical arguments in response to the political challenges of their time based upon modes of knowing that inhere in the conscience. This book historicizes the role of individual moral judgment within larger political movements through the study of American literature from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160795751
Publisher:	Sara Partridge
Publication date:	12/30/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	194 KB

About the Author

Sara Partridge received her Ph.D. in English from New York University, where she studied the history of social justice movements in early American literature. Currently, she serves as a Research Fellow at the Dr. N. Joyce Payne Center for Social Justice at the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, where she works on education policy and civil rights.