Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife

Jennifer McFarlane-Harris is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Seattle Pacific University. Emily Hamilton-Honey is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities and Co-Chief Diversity Officer at SUNY Canton.

Introduction

PART 1: (GOD)MOTHERS OF THEOLOGY:

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE AND ELIZBETH STUART PHELPS

1. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Christian Scholar? A Touch of Feeling in The Gates Ajar

By Brianna Thompson

2. Heaven as a Potential Space: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Afterlife Novels

By James A. Godley

3. Rewriting Heaven: Salvation and the Afterlife in the Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

By Jennine Gleghorn

4. The Archetypal Girl Savior and the Child Theologian: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva and Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore

By LuElla D’Amico

PART 2: SELF-MADE THEOLOGIES: BLACK WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS

5. "As to the Nature of Uncommon Expressions": Jarena Lee’s Supernatural Worldview in The Life and Religious Experiences of Jarena Lee

By Margaret Lowe

6. Conversion and Counter-memory: Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and the Spiritual Motherhood of Mary Magdalene

By Elisabeth McClanahan Harris

7. "What Absurdity Next?": The Precarious Pulpits of Zilpha Elaw, Black Woman Evangelist (1820-65)

By Kimberly Blockett

8. "Aleaving the World, the Flesh, and the Devil": Spiritual Vision and Celibate Holiness in Rebecca Cox Jackson’s Autobiographical Writings

By Jennifer McFarlane-Harris

PART 3: WOMEN AND UTOPIAN THEOLOGIES

9. Discovering the Soul of the New Republic: The Early Fiction of Catherine Maria Sedgwick

By Joan Varnum Ferretti

10. "The Family Order of Heaven": Belinda Marden Pratt’s Apology for Polygamy

By Zachary McLeod Hutchins

11. Theologies of the Afterlife in Mormon Women’s Late-Nineteenth-Century Poetry

By Amy Easton-Flake

12. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Brook Farm, and the Heaven of Association

By Mark Gallagher