Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics)

Jenny Franchot

ISBN 10: 0520086066 / ISBN 13: 9780520086067

Published by University of California Press March 1994, 1994

About this Item

Pictures available upon request.

Seller Inventory # 265710

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics)
• Publisher: University of California Press March 1994
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520086066
• ISBN 13: 9780520086067
• Binding: Trade Paperback
• Condition: Used - Acceptable
• Seller catalogs:
  • Religion

About this title

Synopsis

The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the "foreign" practices of the "immigrant" church is the focus of Jenny Franchot's cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America.

Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about America's origins and destiny. She then focuses on the popular tales of convent incarceration, with their Protestant "maidens" and lecherous, tyrannical Church superiors. Religious captivity narratives, like those of Indian captivity, were part of the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism.

Discussions of Stowe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell―writers who sympathized with "Romanism" and used its imaginative properties in their fiction―further demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character.

About the Author

Jenny Franchot is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.