Bunyan and America

Pilgrim's Progress ◽

American Protestantism ◽

Key Features

This chapter surveys the reception and appropriation of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 1684) in American religious history and literary culture, arguing that, through a series of politically, theologically, and artistically motivated realignments, American adaptations of John Bunyan’s classic shaped key features of American Protestantism and of a distinctively American literary tradition. In the eighteenth century, The Pilgrim’s Progress was evoked to reconceive ‘progress’ along lines more commercial and technological than spiritual. In the nineteenth century, modernized spin-offs became important touchstones in the hotly contested debates over theological liberalism and conservatism. In the increasingly secular twentieth century, it was often either ‘emptied of religion’ and recast as ‘road literature’, or appropriated dialectically as a means for coming to terms with the perceived absurdity of the human condition. In sum, to quote Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘the progress of Pilgrim’s Progress tells us a good bit about the American story’.

EDITORIAL

Eighteenth Century Music ◽

10.1017/s1478570608001462 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 163-164

Author(s):

JOHN BUTT

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Human Condition ◽

Musical Traditions ◽

The Human Condition

I clearly remember that when this journal was first devised there lay some niggling doubt behind my tremendous enthusiasm for this timely initiative. Wasn’t there something problematic about viewing the eighteenth century as a whole? Did I intuit some sort of fundamental divide, perhaps somewhere between the deaths of J. S. Bach and Handel, one that somehow cast this century into two irreconcilable worlds? The seventeenth century was perhaps enough of a mess for its disunity to become a historiographical topic in its own right, its separate threads providing at least some narrative potential, even if these could never convincingly be drawn into a single whole. And the nineteenth century was perhaps sufficiently punctuated with various revolutions and restorations, together with an overriding story of industrial progress, to fall into a coherent (if divisive) family of narratives. Even the twentieth century – that which surely saw the largest number of changes in the human condition and the exponential pluralizing of ‘legitimate’ musical traditions – seems to have a clear enough trajectory, much of the music at its end having a discernible genealogical connection with that of its beginning. So what was it that was worrying me about the eighteenth century?

Is There a Center to American Religious History?

Church History ◽

10.1017/s0009640700095755 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 71 (2) ◽

pp. 380-385 ◽

Author(s):

William Vance Trollinger

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

The United States ◽

Religious History ◽

The Past ◽

American Protestantism ◽

History Of ◽

First Time ◽

Martin Marty

Over the past few years I have been dealing with a narrow version of this question, as it has applied to the history of Protestantism in the twentieth century. In our book, Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to the Present, Douglas Jacobsen and I argued that the two-party model of Protestantism in the United States—conservative vs. liberal, fundamentalist vs. modernist, and so on—does not take into account the remarkable complexity and diversity of the Protestant religious experience in America, and in some sense presents distorted picture of that reality. There were scholars—including Martin Marty, who generously contributed a dissenting essay to our volume—who felt that we had overstated our brief against the two-party paradigm. More relevant for our purposes this evening, there were a number of reviewers who agreed with our critique of the two-party paradigm, but who also expressed disappointment that we provided only the barest outlines of a new or better metaphor or model to explain twentieth-century American Protestantism. While I had not gone into this project thinking that we would end the day with a new interpretive paradigm, I certainly was not surprised by this critique. The very first time I gave a paper on some of our preliminary findings, there was a scholar of U.S. religious history in the audience who squirmed throughout the entirety of my remarks; when I finished, before I had the chance to ask for questions, she blurted out: “I find your argument pretty convincing, but if you can't give me a new model to replace the old one, how am I supposed to teach my course on the history of American Protestantism?” Well, we broaden the topic from Protestantism in the United States to religion in the United States, it would seem that, in many ways, this is the issue we are addressing this evening.

The Distinctiveness of American Denominationalism: A Case Study of the 1846 Evangelical Alliance

Church History ◽

10.2307/3163719 ◽

1976 ◽

Vol 45 (2) ◽

pp. 222-234 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Ernest R. Sandeen

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Chicago School ◽

Religious History ◽

Religious Liberty ◽

European History ◽

Early Nineteenth Century ◽

Characteristic Shape ◽

American Protestantism

The Chicago school in American religious historiography, especially its two most distinguished representatives, W. W. Sweet and Sidney E. Mead, has emphasized the growth of religious liberty as a crucial factor in accounting for the characteristic shape of American Protestantism in the early nineteenth century. The effect of this interpretative hypothesis has been to emphasize the distinctiveness of American religious history while focusing attention so intensely upon American phenomena that evidence from European history which might have served to qualify that hypothesis has not yet received adequate attention.

Introduction

Church History ◽

10.1017/s0009640700097341 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 72 (4) ◽

pp. 699-702 ◽

Author(s):

Grant Wacker

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Religious History ◽

Early Nineteenth Century

From the early nineteenth century through the middle twentieth century, foreign and domestic missionaries ranked among the most conspicuous figures of American religious history. In many quarters they still do. “Don't apologize,” one academic quipped at a conference in India. “All Americans are missionaries.”

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽

10.3167/trans.2017.070209 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 115-119 ◽

Author(s):

Susan E. Bell ◽

Kathy Davis

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Ming Dynasty ◽

Third Century ◽

Refugee Crisis ◽

The Third ◽

Opium War ◽

The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

Handel to Tempah

Migrant City ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300210972.003.0011 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 281-306

Author(s):

Panikos Panayi

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

National Level ◽

Cultural Transfer ◽

External Influences ◽

Short Run ◽

Early Eighteenth Century ◽

Evolution Of Music

This chapter explores how migrants have contributed to the evolution of music in London. Despite episodes of xenophobia in the London musical scene, xenophilia became stronger, partly driven by the fact that both music and musicians inevitably migrate. This is so that, while national traditions of music may emerge, the process of cultural transfer involving both sound and people mean that such traditions cannot remain sealed off from external influences, even if they may develop national-level identities, at least in the short run. While music and musicians crossed European boundaries, during the twentieth century both performers and their tunes have increasingly spanned global and consequently racial divides. The German assertion that nineteenth-century Britain constituted a ‘Land ohne Musik’ (land without music), while an exaggeration, partly explains the arrival of foreign musicians to Victorian London and the eras before and since. The constant settlement and visits by musicians to the British capital since the early eighteenth century meant that London did not become a city without music, even if the tunes and those who played them often originated from abroad.

Abandoned Quarries

Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691179131.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 129-136

Author(s):

Seth Perry

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

National Identity ◽

Religious History ◽

Early National Period ◽

The Bible ◽

Early National ◽

American National Identity ◽

History Of ◽

National Period

This concluding chapter discusses the consequences of biblicism in the early national period for subsequent American religious history. It considers bible culture in the later nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the corporatization of religious printing amplifed the Bible's status as an abstract commodity. Responding to the arguments put forward by W. P. Strickland in his 1849 History of the American Bible Society, the chapter argues that attaching the Bible's importance to American national identity could not leave the Bible unchanged, because that is not how scripturalization works. It also explains how the Bible's availability for citation and re-citation fundamentally changed the desire, effectiveness, and circumstances of its citation. Finally, it uses the abandoned quarry—empty because it has flled other places—as a figure for the themes of citation, performance, and identity explored in this book.

The Theological Mediation

The Wisdom and Power of the Cross ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197516522.003.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 3-41

Author(s):

Richard Viladesau

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Human Condition ◽

Karl Barth ◽

Theology Of The Cross ◽

Reformed Tradition ◽

Hans Urs Von Balthasar ◽

The Holocaust ◽

Reformation Theology ◽

Late Modern

This chapter examines late modern reappropriations of the classical theology of the cross. In continuity with medieval and Reformation theology, these hold that Christ’s suffering was a divinely willed redemptive act, in vicarious satisfaction for human sin. The neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, in line with the Reformed tradition, emphasizes election and covenant. The theme of divine kenosis, found in nineteenth century German an English thinkers, is taken up into Orthodox trinitarian soteriology by the Russian theologian Sergei Bulgakov, with strong attention to Patristic dogma. Hans Urs von Balthasar stresses Christ’s “descent into hell” as the central symbol of the divine entry into the lost human condition. Jürgen Moltmann sees the suffering of God as the only possible theological response to the horrors of the twentieth century, especially the Holocaust.

THE DISCOURSE OF SOUND

Tempo ◽

10.1017/s0040298216000152 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 70 (277) ◽

pp. 5-15 ◽

Author(s):

Martin Kaltenecker

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Michel Foucault ◽

Art Music ◽

Sound Studies ◽

Western Art ◽

Compositional Styles ◽

Technical Features ◽

Shed Light

AbstractThis article offers a short overview of the development of listening theories concerning Western art music since the end of the eighteenth century. Referring to Michel Foucault, I consider such theories as discourses which produce ‘power effects', such as the training of listening attitudes, or the construction of specific spaces, such as the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. During the eighteenth century, predominant discourses considered musical pieces as orations and, since the nineteenth century, as complex organisms or structures. In the last third of the twentieth century a focus on sound, evinced for instance by the field of ‘sound studies', has produced a new configuration that dissolves the prevailing model of structural listening. This perspective may shed light on some technical features of contemporary compositional styles, which I examine by considering the use of melodies, gestures and loops in two compositions by Fausto Romitelli and Simon Steen-Andersen.

Tokkelossie, “’n Boesman, outa Hendrik” en ontkennende close readings

Literator ◽

10.4102/lit.v29i3.125 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 29 (3) ◽

pp. 57-74

Author(s):

H. Willemse

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Literary Tradition ◽

Structural Refinement ◽

Scholarly Literature

Tikoloshe, “a Bushman, outa Hendrik” and denialist close readingsThis article explores in two main sections the changing perceptions of Afrikaner folklorists and literary critics on the origins of selected indigenous Southern African oral tales. With the emergence of Afrikaner Nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, young Afrikaner activists often incorporated indigenous folktales in the development of a nascent Afrikaans literary tradition. Initially, the origins and the authenticity of such written-down versions of performances were rarely in dispute. However, around the mid-twentieth century, a period that coincides with a more confident Afrikaner Nationalism, Afrikaner folklorists came to doubt these original explanations. One prominent scholar in particular advanced views that seemed to favour European influence and structural refinement rather than indigenous origination. The second section ties in with the first in a discussion of the tale, “Klein Riet-alleen-in-die-Roerkuil” from “Dwaalstories en ander vertellings” (1927) by Eugène N. Marais. An intinerant storyteller, Hendrik, originally performed the tale which Marais, immediately following the performance, committed to print. Lately a body of scholarly literature, mostly close readings, came about which diminishes the role of the initial performer in favour of Marais’ writerly aesthetics. The article takes issue with these interpretations and argues for the restoration and recognition of Hendrik’s role as the creator of the initial performances.