American spaces of conversion: The conductive imaginaries of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James

This dissertation explores how the concept of conversion, as articulated in Puritan Reformed theology and transplanted to the Massachusetts Bay colony, remained a vital cultural force shaping developments in American literary and philosophical expression. Testimonies of conversion recorded by Thomas Shepard reveal an active pursuit of belief by prospective church members occurring at the intersection of feeling, intellect, doctrine, and perception. I argue that this pursuit of belief, originally undertaken by the Puritans as a way to conceptualize redemption in a fallen state, established the epistemological contours of what Edwards, Emerson, and James would theorize as a conductive imaginary acting as a site for adaptations in belief structures. By defining, energizing, and binding the relations between an individual, the divine (or incalculable), and the environment, the experience of belief, what James would call the "will to believe," framed the dynamics between an individual and history, society, and nature. I show, primarily through an analysis of the scientific, philosophical, and theological contexts of each author's period, that as an epistemological process where a perceiver is linked to an infinite potential, the morphology of conversion remained of deep interest to Edwards, Emerson, and James who each developed philosophies celebrating the perception and translation of experience through an affective relation to the environment.