'The Vortex of Enthusiasm': Religion and the Making of American Literature

This dissertation explores how the concept of religious enthusiasm shaped American literature and culture from the Revolution through the Civil War. It traces a new narrative of the relation between literature, religion, and public life in this crucial moment of national formation, as languages and narratives of enthusiasm proliferated across a variety of sites and discourses. The ongoing confrontation between the legacy of Enlightenment and a culture being transformed by the experience of revolution and religious revivalism demanded reconsideration of previous conceptions of normative religious experience and the construction of civil society. In the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, I show how the intellectual roots and popular manifestations of the concept of religious enthusiasm that circulated in the Atlantic world impacted American literature, and were in turn reimagined and reshaped by that literature. Through an examination of Enlightenment historiography, romantic philosophy, movements of reform and revivalism, and their interaction with the developing literary culture of the new nation, I argue that enthusiasm was an important--if often controversial and ambiguous--concept that contributed to nineteenth-century conceptions of the relationship between religion, literature, and an emerging American public sphere.