Mary Rowlandson and the Invention of the Secular

Traister, Bryce

doi:10.1353/eal.2007.0029

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Michael Warner considers the implications of the secular hermeneutic for literary criticism, using early American author Mary Rowlandson as his example: “We are very good at assimilating texts and authors to the normative ideals of our own critical activity. But those normative dimensions of her [Rowlandson's] reading practice that cultivate piety – precisely in the suppression of what we could call critical distance or agency – must be ignored or explained away” (2004, 33; see also Traister ). The line of thinking Warner introduces, Kaufmann observes, could “allow for a Christian reading of a text” (2009, 70).…”

Section: What Is Postsecularism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a Postsecular Eighteenth Century

Conway

Harol

2015

Literature Compass

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The twenty-first-century "turns" to religion, to theology, and to postsecularity have challenged the central tenets of the secularization thesis, even at times proclaiming its end. But scholarship on eighteenth-century British literature has not taken upwhether to defend or delegitimize secularization as fact or normthe challenges posed by these developments as often as other fields. This essay discusses why this might be so, and it points to work, and avenues for work, that might prove fruitful in reevaluating the secularization thesis. It argues that eighteenth-century literary critics should address the concerns and methods of postsecularism and that we have a special role to play in this area of scholarship.

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Section: What Is Postsecularism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a Postsecular Eighteenth Century

Conway

Harol

2015

Literature Compass

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“…All this psychological and spiritual torture inflicted upon Rowlandson presented a big challenge to her high status she was used to in her world before captive and, therefore, the most important and most difficult thing for Rowlandson is to overcome the mourning all that she had lost. The female self commemorated in 1682 would become the voice of a post-Puritan Protestant femininity (Traister, 1999). This point can be powerfully supported when Rowlandson described Thomas Read, a male captive, who was scared to "cry bitterly, supposing they would quickly kill him" (p. 365).…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

Conflict between Self-discovery and Salvation in Mary Rowlandson‟s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God

Cao¹,

Xu²

2012

TPLS

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Reading the Posthuman Backwards: Mary Rowlandson's Doubled Witnessing

Smith¹

2012

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Taking its cue from theorists who note the persistence of a humanist imaginary in popular iterations of posthumanism, this essay queries how the posthuman subject projected by theory might "speak" the autobiographical, and troubles the notion of the posthuman as an epochal designation by turning back to consider what a posthuman lens might reveal about the earliest of colonial American autobiographical narratives, Mary Rowlandson's 1682 captivity narrative. In The True Relation , Rowlandson affirms to her reader how the practice of Biblical exemplarity sustained the affl icted captive as she endured successive removals, and how it sustains the writer as she narrates the story of affliction and restoration. Yet, witnessing to survival, the narrator of The True Relation shifts discourse to become an accidental, unsystematic, proto-humanist ethnographer of encounter, dislocating the saint as posthuman subject through an incipiently humanist attentiveness to difference.

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Mary Rowlandson and the Invention of the Secular

Cited by 5 publications

References 29 publications

Toward a Postsecular Eighteenth Century

Toward a Postsecular Eighteenth Century

Conflict between Self-discovery and Salvation in Mary Rowlandson‟s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God

Reading the Posthuman Backwards: Mary Rowlandson's Doubled Witnessing

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