Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife

A Step Closer to Heaven

Jennifer McFarlane-Harris, Emily Hamilton-Honey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000407297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

This collection analyzes the theme of the "afterlife" as it animated nineteenth-century American women's theology-making and appeals for social justice. Authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Martha Finley, Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, Zilpha Elaw, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Belinda Marden Pratt, and others wrote to have a voice in the moral debates that were consuming churches and national politics. These texts are expressions of the lives and dynamic minds of women who developed sophisticated, systematic spiritual and textual approaches to the divine, to their denominations or religious traditions, and to the mainstream culture around them. Women do not simply live out theologies authored by men. Rather, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven is grounded in the radical notion that the theological principles crafted by women and derived from women's experiences, intellectual habits, and organizational capabilities are foundational to American literature itself.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Author Biographies
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I (God)Mothers of Theology: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Elizbeth Stuart Phelps
• Part II Self-Made Theologies: Black Women’s Autobiographical Writings
• Part III Women and Utopian Theologies
• Index