Apocalyptic Geographies : : Religion, Media, and the American Landscape / / Jerome Tharaud.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2020 English
• VerfasserIn: Tharaud, Jerome,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (360 p.) :; 8 color + 50 b/w illus.

How nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to shape American cultureIn nineteenth-century America, "apocalypse" referred not to the end of the world but to sacred revelation, and "geography" meant both the physical landscape and its representation in printed maps, atlases, and pictures. In Apocalyptic Geographies, Jerome Tharaud explores how white Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to present the antebellum landscape as a “sacred space” of spiritual pilgrimage, and how devotional literature influenced secular society in important and surprising ways.Reading across genres and media—including religious tracts and landscape paintings, domestic fiction and missionary memoirs, slave narratives and moving panoramas—Apocalyptic Geographies illuminates intersections of popular culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the spiritual narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. Placing works of literature and visual art—from Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—into new contexts, Tharaud traces the rise of evangelical media, the controversy and backlash it engendered, and the role it played in shaping American modernity.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part I. Evangelical Space -- 1. Thomas Cole and the Landscape of Evangelical Print -- 2. Abolitionist Mediascapes: The American Anti-Slavery Society and the Sacred Geography of Emancipation -- 3. The Human Medium: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the New-York Evangelist -- Part II. Geographies of the Secular -- 4. Pilgrimage to the “Secular Center”: Tourism and the Sentimental Novel -- 5. Cosmic Modernity: Henry David Thoreau, the Missionary Memoir, and the Heathen Within -- 6. The Sensational Republic: Catholic Conspiracy and the Battle for the Great West -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- A NOTE ON THE TYPE