“I Have No Disbelief”: Spiritualism and Secular Agency in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons

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dc.contributor.authorReed, Ashleyen
dc.contributor.departmentEnglishen
dc.date.accessioned2021-01-10T20:38:56Zen
dc.date.available2021-01-10T20:38:56Zen
dc.date.issued2017en
dc.date.updated2021-01-10T20:38:53Zen
dc.description.abstractThis essay explores the imagery of Spiritualist religion that runs through Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons, arguing that the exercise of Spiritualist gifts including clairvoyance, trance-speaking, and spirit-traveling enables the Morgeson sisters to access multiple forms of cross-gender and cross-class agency. The Morgesons has long been read as a novel of secularization that records the decline of New England Calvinist orthodoxy in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In fact The Morgesons depicts the secular situation in the antebellum period—characterized by increasing religious diversity and new religious modalities—and explores the multiple forms of female agency made available by a secular milieu. This essay reveals how critical regimes that prioritize liberal, secularized models of agency over discursive, secular models obscure the forms of circulating and collaborative agency at play in novels by Stoddard and other women writers.en
dc.description.notes< AUDIENCE: International >< REFEREED: Yes >< PUBLICAVAIL: No >< USER_REFERENCE_CREATOR: Yes >< ACC_END: 2015-09-30 >< ACC_START: 2015-09-01 >< DTx_ACC: 09/2015 >< SUB_END: 2015-08-28 >< SUB_START: 2015-08-28 >< DTx_SUB: 28/08/2015 >en
dc.description.versionPublished (Publication status)en
dc.format.extentPages 151-177en
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2017.0008en
dc.identifier.eissn2166-7438en
dc.identifier.issue1en
dc.identifier.orcidReed, Ashley [0000-0002-0070-5364]en
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10919/101821en
dc.identifier.volume5en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherProject Museen
dc.rightsIn Copyright (InC)en
dc.rights.urihttp://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/en
dc.title“I Have No Disbelief”: Spiritualism and Secular Agency in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesonsen
dc.title.serialJ19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanistsen
dc.typeArticle - Refereeden
dc.type.dcmitypeTexten
dc.type.otherArticleen
pubs.organisational-group/Virginia Tech/All T&R Facultyen
pubs.organisational-group/Virginia Tech/Liberal Arts and Human Sciencesen
pubs.organisational-group/Virginia Tech/Liberal Arts and Human Sciences/Englishen
pubs.organisational-group/Virginia Tech/Liberal Arts and Human Sciences/CLAHS T&R Facultyen
pubs.organisational-group/Virginia Techen

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