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Some Wild Visions
Elizabeth Elkin Grammer
其他書名
Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in Nineteenth-century America
出版Oxford University Press, 2003
主題Biography & Autobiography / GeneralBiography & Autobiography / ReligiousBiography & Autobiography / WomenHistory / United States / 19th CenturyJuvenile Nonfiction / Language Arts / GeneralReligion / Christianity / HistoryReligion / Christianity / GeneralSocial Science / Women's Studies
ISBN01951396159780195139617
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=TXg8DwAAQBAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBookSAMPLE
註釋This literary study concerns the spiritual autobiographies of seven nineteenth-century American women who found themselves called, often by way of wild visions, to become itinerant evangelists. Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Nancy Towle, Lydia Sexton, Laura Haviland, Julia Foote, and Amanda Berry Smith, though living and writing in an age which perfected the ideology of domesticity, chose literal homelessness for long periods of their lives, thus renouncing their claim upon the paradigm by which many northern women, black and white, measured their lives. Such itinerant lives were no doubt hard to live; they were even harder to write. All autobiographies, of course, attempt to make a story out of the welter of remembered events which constitute the writer's raw material; they attempt, that is, to discover the pattern and the meaning in experience. But if the experiences in question are new and unfamiliar, where will the autobiographer find the cultural reference points which can reveal, or impose, pattern and meaning? The autobiographies which these women wrote are remarkable documents—sometimes artless, often long, and nearly always desperate attempts to assemble, out of familiar cultural materials, plausible representations of lives which were anything but familiar. Invoking in quick succession different and even contradictory models of self—the biblical paradigm of the suffering servant, the domestic ideal of the nurturing mother, and the capitalistic image of the fantastically productive entrepreneur—they attempt to patch together comprehensible Lives which would somehow be equal to their radically original lives. Literally, psychologically, and ideologically, these female preachers were "out of place," both in the world of nineteenth-century evangelicalism and in American culture generally.