Читать книгу American Quaker Romances. Building the Myth of the White Christian Nation онлайн

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Second, I have limited my analysis to historical romances, i.e., romances that take place at some point in the period that goes from the seventeenth century to the Second World War. Besides being historicals, the romances selected for this book have been written in the last years of the twentieth century or in the first decades of the twenty-first century, with the exception of Janet Whitney’s Judith, which was published in 1944, that is, the year before the end of the Second World War. This means that I have not taken into consideration romances written in the nineteenth century despite their immense interest nor in the first decades of the twentieth century. For once, at the time when they were written—especially those published in the nineteenth-century—they were not historical, but contemporary. What is more, many of them have already been analyzed by James Emmett Ryan in his article “Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in Early American Fiction” (2003). In this article, Ryan demonstrates that Quakers were often used as moral exemplars in the American fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ryan also argues that by World War I, the stereotypical Quakers used by nineteenth-century writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, Eliza Buckminster Lee, Harriet Beecher Stowe or Louisa May Alcott, among many others, came to be used much less frequently, as if Quakerism had outlived its usefulness as an exemplary model. This trend, however, is reversed at the end of the twentieth century, with the rise of Christian romances and the renewed interest in the Religious Society of Friends that this book attests to.