Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture

by Barbara B. Oberg (Editor), Harry S. Stout (Editor)

Overview

This interdisciplinary collection of comparative essays by distinguished historians and literary critics looks at aspects of the thought of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin and considers the place of these two men in American culture. Probably the two most examined figures of the colonial period, they have often been the object of comparative studies. These characterizations usually portray them as mutually exclusive ideal types, thus placing them in categories as different and opposed as "traditional" and "modern." In these essays--by such scholars as William Breitenbach, Edwin Gaustad, Elizabeth Dunn, and Ruth Bloch--polemical contrasts disappear and Edwards and Franklin emerge as contrapuntal themes in a larger unity. Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture is a valuable addition to scholarship on American literature and thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195344875
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/20/1993
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	486 KB

Table of Contents

	Contributors	ix
1.	Introduction	3
	Mind
2.	Religious Affections and Religious Affectations: Antinomianism and Hypocrisy in the Writings of Edwards and Franklin	13
3.	Enlightenment and Awakening in Edwards and Franklin	27
4.	The Nature of True--and Useful--Virtue: From Edwards to Franklin	42
5.	"A Wall Between Them Up to Heaven": Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin	58
6.	Franklin, Edwards, and the Problem of Human Nature	75
	Culture
7.	The Two Cultures in Eighteenth-Century America	101
8.	The Laughter of One: Sweetness and Light in Franklin and Edwards	114
9.	Women, Love, and Virtue in the Thought of Edwards and Franklin	134
10.	The Selling of the Self: From Franklin to Barnum	152
	Language
11.	Reason, Rhythm, and Style	171
12.	Rhetorical Strategies in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County	186
13.	Humanizing the Monster: Integral Self Versus Bodied Soul in the Personal Writings of Franklin and Edwards	204
	Index	219