Culture and Redemption : Religion, the Secular, and American Literature 

Tracy Fessenden認為，美國教會與國家的分離不均，遠不捍衛民主繁榮的舞台，反而促進了特定形式的宗教可能性，同時遏製或壓製或排斥他人。

關於宗教在公共生活中適當角色的問題變得前所未有的時候，文化和救贖從根本上挑戰了美國“世俗”對公共領域的傳統描繪 - 慶祝或詛咒。 “文化與救贖”對美國法律案例，兒童讀物、佈道和辯論以及17世紀至20世紀的流行和經典文學作品進行了研究，展示了美國文化的世俗化不是現代性不可避免的副產品，而是通過共同努力使主流形式的新教身份與民主，民間身份一致。Fessenden表明，這一過程與涉及民族文化經常暴力排斥的做法有密切關係：排印、宗教和其他少數群體的強迫文化交流，內部和外部殖民化以及嚴格的性別結構。

她對Emerson，Whitman，Melville，Stowe，Twain，Gilman，Fitzgerald以及其他一些以復雜且常常出乎意料的方式表達自己的新讀物推動了對美國作品的重新解讀。

Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others.

At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere. Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender.

Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.

 Tracy Fessenden  (Autor)

Publisher:Princeton University Press 

ISBN:    978-0691049632 

 原價   US 35 台幣價 NT$:1225