Evangelicals and Aesthetics from the 1750s to the 1930s

This unique book aims to provide the first extended account of theintellectual history of aesthetic discourse among British and Americanevangelicals from the awakening of a modern aesthetic consciousnessin the eighteenth century to the fundamentalist-modernist controversyof the early twentieth century. Drawing on an extensive but largelyforgotten body of periodical source materials, it seeks to map theevangelical aesthetic tradition's intellectual terrain, to highlight itsconnections to other philosophical discourses, and to assess some ofits theological implications. In doing so, it challenges the still prevalentstereotype of evangelicalism as aesthetically 'impoverished' anddevoid of serious reflection on the arts, offering instead a narrativesensitive to the historical complexities of evangelical approaches toaesthetic theory and criticism.