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This modern classic by one of our leading scholars seeks to explain the values prevalent in today's mass culture by tracing them back to their roots in the Victorian era. As religion lost its hold on the public mind, clergymen and educated women, powerless and insignificant in the society of the time, together exerted a profound effect on the only areas open to their influence: the arts and literature. Women wrote books that idealized the very qualities that kept them powerless: timidity, piety, and a disdain for competition. Sentimental values that permeated popular literature continue to influence modern culture, preoccupied as it is with glamour, banal melodrama, and mindless consumption.
This new paperback edition, with a new Preface, will reach yet more readers with its persuasive and provocative theory. Richard Bernstein of The New York Times said: "Her remarkable scholarship is going to set the standard for a long time to come."
A modern classic, this book seeks to explain the values prevalent in today's mass culture by tracing them back to their roots in Victorian times.
| Acknowledgments | ||
| Preface to the 1998 Noonday Edition | ||
| Introduction: The Legacy of American Victorianism: The Meaning of Little Eva | 3 | |
| Pt. 1 | The Sentimentalization of Status | |
| 1 | Clerical Disestablishment | 17 |
| 2 | Feminine Disestablishment | 44 |
| 3 | Ministers and Mothers: Changing and Exchanging Roles | 80 |
| Pt. 2 | The Sentimentalization of Creed and Culture | |
| 4 | The Loss of Theology: From Dogma to Fiction | 121 |
| 5 | The Escape from History: The Static Imagination | 165 |
| 6 | The Domestication of Death: The Posthumous Congregation | 200 |
| 7 | The Periodical Press: Arena for Hostility | 227 |
| Pt. 3 | Protest: Case Studies in American Romanticism | |
| 8 | Margaret Fuller and the Disavowal of Fiction | 259 |
| 9 | Herman Melville and the Revolt Against the Reader Epilogue | 289 |
| Epilogue | 327 | |
| App. A | Alphabetical Listing of Women and Ministers | 330 |
| App. B | Chronological Listing of Women and Ministers | 332 |
| Notes | 346 | |
| Index | 389 |
Overview
This modern classic by one of our leading scholars seeks to explain the values prevalent in today's mass culture by tracing them back to their roots in the Victorian era. As religion lost its hold on the public mind, clergymen and educated women, powerless and insignificant in the society of the time, together exerted a profound effect on the only areas open to their influence: the arts and literature. Women wrote books that idealized the very qualities that kept them powerless: timidity, piety, and a disdain for...