Amy Dunham Strand – författare

Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how American women writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Emily Dickinson translated petitioning – a political form for redress of grievances with religious resonance, or what Strand calls “political prayer” – in their literary works. At a time when petitioning was historically transforming governments, mobilizing masses, and democratizing North America, these White women writers wrote “literary petitions” to advocate for others in social justice causes such as antiremoval, antislavery, and labor reform, to transform American literature and culture, and to articulate an ambivalent political agency. Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature introduces historic petitioning into literary study as an overlooked but important new lens for reading nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. Understanding petitions in these literary works – and these literary works as petitions – also helps us to understand women’s political agency before their enfranchisement, to explain why scholars have long debated and inconsistently interpreted the works of well-anthologized women writers, and to see more clearly the multidimensional, coexisting, and often competing religious and political aspects of their writings.

Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how American women writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Emily Dickinson translated petitioning – a political form for redress of grievances with religious resonance, or what Strand calls “political prayer” – in their literary works. At a time when petitioning was historically transforming governments, mobilizing masses, and democratizing North America, these White women writers wrote “literary petitions” to advocate for others in social justice causes such as antiremoval, antislavery, and labor reform, to transform American literature and culture, and to articulate an ambivalent political agency. Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature introduces historic petitioning into literary study as an overlooked but important new lens for reading nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. Understanding petitions in these literary works – and these literary works as petitions – also helps us to understand women’s political agency before their enfranchisement, to explain why scholars have long debated and inconsistently interpreted the works of well-anthologized women writers, and to see more clearly the multidimensional, coexisting, and often competing religious and political aspects of their writings.

Examining language debates and literary texts from Noah Webster to H.L. Mencken and from Washington Irving to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book demonstrates how gender arose in passionate discussions about language to address concerns about national identity and national citizenship elicited by 19th-century sociopolitical transformations. Together with popular commentary about language in Congressional records, periodicals, grammar books, etiquette manuals, and educational materials, literary products tell stories about how gendered discussions of language worked to deflect nationally divisive debates over Indian Removal and slavery, to stabilize mid-19th-century sociopolitical mobility, to illuminate the logic of Jim Crow, and to temper the rise of "New Women" and "New Immigrants" at the end and turn of the 19th century. Strand enhances our understandings of how ideologies of language, gender, and nation have been interarticulated in American history and culture and how American literature has been entwined in their construction, reflection, and dissemination.