Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum AmericaUniversity of Georgia Press, 2006 M12 1 - 280 páginas In this study, T. Gregory Garvey illustrates how activists and reformers claimed the instruments of mass media to create a freestanding culture of reform that enabled voices disfranchised by church or state to speak as equals in public debates over the nation’s values. Competition among antebellum reformers in religion, women’s rights, and antislavery institutionalized a structure of ideological debate that continues to define popular reform movements. The foundations of the culture of reform lie, according to Garvey, in the reconstruction of publicity that coincided with the religious-sectarian struggles of the early nineteenth century. To counter challenges to their authority and to retain church members, both conservative and liberal religious factions developed instruments of reform propaganda (newspapers, conventions, circuit riders, revivals) that were adapted by an emerging class of professional secular reformers in the women’s rights and antislavery movements. Garvey argues that debate among the reformers created a mode of “critical conversation” through which reformers of all ideological persuasions collectively forged new conventions of public discourse as they struggled to shape public opinion. Focusing on debates between Lyman Beecher and William Ellery Channing over religious doctrine, Angelina Grimke and Catharine Beecher over women’s participation in antislavery, and William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass over the ethics of political participation, Garvey argues that “crucible-like sites of public debate” emerged as the core of the culture of reform. To emphasize the redefinition of publicity provoked by antebellum reform movements, Garvey concludes the book with a chapter that presents Emersonian self-reliance as an effort to transform the partisan nature of reform discourse into a model of sincere public speech that affirms both self and community. |
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... rhetoric of “traditional values” grounded in the paternalistic patterns of religious obedience. In the ebb and flow of religious fervor that they represent, revivals in the nineteenth century dramatize the ideological instability of a ...
... rhetorical conventions that should characterize an ideal public realm, reformers raised vital ethical questions about ... rhetoric from the conventions of partisan politics, is also a central task of this book. The public sphere in which ...
... rhetoric of racial equality, publicity implied an honest, progressive process through which civic-minded citizens expressed their interests in order to mediate differences. But on another level, the public sphere implied a realm of ...
... rhetorical project of facilitating pluralism by claiming equality on the public stage was very different for Angelina Grimké and Frederick Douglass, and this dimension of their lives as reformers reveals much about the subtleties of ...
... rhetoric about slavery threatened the viability of the nation. In doing so, I hope to dramatize the contrast between the conventions of the culture of reform and the political discourse it reacted against. Despite serious reservations ...
Contenido
1 | |
Religious Pluralism and the Origins of the Culture of Reform | 31 |
Sincerity and Publicity in the GrimkéBeecher Debate | 74 |
Garrison Douglass and the Problem of Politics | 121 |
Emersons SelfReliance as a Theory of Community | 161 |
Sincerity and Pluralism in Critical Conversation | 199 |
Notes | 203 |
Bibliography | 223 |
Index | 237 |
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Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America T. Gregory Garvey Sin vista previa disponible - 2010 |