Dissertation Fellow 2003-04
Haein Park (Literature)
University of California, San Diego
Converging Roads: Catholicism and American Literary
Responses, 1864-1930
My research focuses on attitudes toward Catholicism in the literature
of the United States from 1864 to 1930. I identify how Catholicism
in general and anti-Catholic sentiments in particular contribute
to the formation of the cultural productions of this period. Examining
both popular and elite literature, I investigate why Catholicism
became a particular interest and preoccupying concern for many American
writers of Protestant origin during this period. I examine how Catholicism
converged with various historical and cultural forces to lead American
writers such as Josiah Strong, Mark Twain, Henry James, Harold Frederic
and Willa Cather to conceptualize their personal and national identities
in relation to this particular faith.
During the antebellum period, Catholicism both fascinated and repulsed
Protestant Americans. It operated as an imaginary category through
which writers voiced the tensions and limitations inherent in mainstream
Protestant culture. I investigate how attitudes toward Catholicism
changed with the shifting cultural terrain of the postwar period.
Although it continued to function as an alternately vilified and
sanctified other, I argue that it was perceived in less relentlessly
binary terms and with greater nuance and complexity during this
time. For a growing number of American writers, Catholicism became
a site for locating different aesthetic, social, and theological
agendas in response to the contradictions and anxieties resulting
from rapid expansion, urbanization and industrialization, and dramatic
increase in immigration. I argue in my dissertation that Catholicism
functioned as a negotiating space through which writers of Protestant
origin attempted to come to terms with emerging modern culture.
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