Bodies of Life Shaker Literature and Literacies

Subjects:

• Literature » American Literature
• Popular Culture » American Studies
• Religious Studies » Comparative Religion

Reviews:

• Well researched and well reasoned, this excellent book adds distinctly to the substantive and theoretical literature on Shakers serving graduate students, researchers, and faculty.
  —Choice
• ...[A] thought provoking examination of the freedom and the effects of Shaker spiritual literacies. The author's work is a masterful description of how the Shaker Milennial faith, with its emphasis on the Christ Spirit's progressive embodiment in all aspects of human life, is reflected in Shaker literature.
  —Shaker Road
• Anyone with an interest in early American literature, literacy, religious history, and gender studies will find this study of Shaker culture a rich and innovative resource.
  —American Literature
• This volume is a sophisticated engagement.... Madden breaks new ground...She is not the first scholar of American literature to examine Shaker narratives and publications, but she has brought to the task a new level of sophistication in contemporary literacy theory.
  —Utopian Studies

• Endorsement From Stephen J. Stein
  Chancellors' Professor and Chair
  Department of Religious Studies
  Indiana University, Bloomington: In this instructive volume Etta Madden probes the ways in which both reading and writing among the Shakers enriched the lives of the Believers. Her focus on the variety of literacies within the community adds immensely to our understanding of the Shaker traditions of spirituality. Her recognition of the multiplicity of 'texts' among the Believers as well as the creative tensions between public and private, oral and written, male and female, physical and spiritual, enhances our knowledge and provides insight into critical pieces of Shaker literature. Madden's preoccupation with the role of the body in all this discourse ties her work to major currents of contemporary scholarship. This is a sophisticated contribution to current Shaker scholarship.
• Endorsement From Jean M. Humez
  University of Massachusetts, Boston: I have found [the book] to be highly readable, interesting, cogent, well bolstered by knowledge of relevant secondary studies, and brimming with good ideas. It ought to make significant contributions to interdisciplinary Shaker studies, to the study of American religious culture and to the study of literacy in general. Madden is one of the few people in Shaker studies so far to insist that we look at Shaker literature not just for what it can yield the historian or the scholar of religion, but also for its importance as American culture.
• Endorsement From David D. Hall
  Harvard Divinity School: To the simple question, 'how did Shakers read and how did they understand writing,' this book returns a remarkably interesting series of answers that engage with the overlapping significance of orality and writing, authority and freedom, ecstasy and control. An important addition to our understanding of the meaning of print, writing, and orality in 19th-century America.

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Varieties of Literary Experiences: An Overview of Shaker Reading and Writing
• Letters, Spirits, and Bodies: The Shakers' Spiritual Literacies
• Doctrinal Guides to Spiritual Literacies: McNemar's Kentucky Revival and Dunlavy's Manifesto
• (Ad)Dressing Naked Bodies with Pious Suffering: Writing and Readings of the 1816 Testimonies
• Reading, Writing, Race, and Mother-Imagery: The Literacies of Rebecca Cox Jackson and Alonzo Giles Hollister
• Preserving the Body in Poetry: The Canterbury Obituary Journal
• Private Acts and Possible Worlds: Shaker Literacies at the Turn of the Century
• Works Cited
• Index