Ebook: The Economy of Religion in American Literature: Culture and the Politics of Redemption

This book offers a thoroughgoing reassessment of the relationship of religion and economics in American culture. Its guiding questions include: Are we truly living in a secular age? How did a Christian nation come to embrace capitalism? What role did religion play in the conflict of capital and labor in fin de siècle America? How are we to understand the status of religion in contemporary American culture? What light can the literary archive shed on the relationship of religion and economics?
Positing that capitalism was not derived from fixed religious norms, but rather that the economic developments of the machine age fundamentally reshaped American Protestantism, it refutes the long-held secularization thesis by showing that economy and religion were purposively conflated and that this syncretic process was integral to the production of modern American culture.
Focusing on the period 1840–1940 and examining work from writers like Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis it shows how concepts of salvation were transformed by the Market and Industrial Revolutions and examines the central role of such concepts in class conflict at the turn of the century.