Description

Book Synopsis

In the tumultuous decades of rapid expansion and change between the American Founding and the Civil War, Americans confronted a cluster of overlapping crises whose common theme was the difficulty of finding authority in written texts. The issue arose from several disruptive developments: rising challenges to the traditional authority of the Bible in a society that was intensely Protestant; persistent worries over America's lack of a national literature and an independent cultural identity; and the slavery crisis, which provoked tremendous struggles over clashing interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, even as these parascriptures were rising to the status of a kind of quasi-sacred secular canon.

At the same time but from the opposite direction, new mass media were creating a new, industrial-scale print culture that put a premium on very non-sacred, disposable text: mass-produced news, dispensed immediately and in huge quantities but meant only

Perpetual Scriptures in NineteenthCentury America

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    A Paperback by Prof. or Dr. Jeff Smith

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      Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
      Publication Date: Publication Date: 20/01/2025
      ISBN13: 9781501398995, 978-1501398995
      ISBN10:
      Also in:
      Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      In the tumultuous decades of rapid expansion and change between the American Founding and the Civil War, Americans confronted a cluster of overlapping crises whose common theme was the difficulty of finding authority in written texts. The issue arose from several disruptive developments: rising challenges to the traditional authority of the Bible in a society that was intensely Protestant; persistent worries over America's lack of a national literature and an independent cultural identity; and the slavery crisis, which provoked tremendous struggles over clashing interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, even as these parascriptures were rising to the status of a kind of quasi-sacred secular canon.

      At the same time but from the opposite direction, new mass media were creating a new, industrial-scale print culture that put a premium on very non-sacred, disposable text: mass-produced news, dispensed immediately and in huge quantities but meant only

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