A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination (Studies in Religion and Culture) - Softcover

Devin P. Zuber (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813943515 ISBN 13: 9780813943510

Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 2020

Synopsis

Long overlooked, the natural philosophy and theosophy of the Scandinavian scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) made a surprising impact in America. Thomas Jefferson, while president, was so impressed with the message of a Baltimore Swedenborgian minister that he invited him to address both houses of Congress. But Swedenborgian thought also made its contribution to nineteenth-century American literature, particularly within the aesthetics of American Transcendentalism. Although various scholars have addressed how American Romanticism was affected by different currents of Continental thought and religious ideology, surprisingly no book has yet described the specific ways that American Romantics made persistent recourse to Swedenborg for their respective projects to re-enchant nature.

In A Language of Things, Devin Zuber offers a critical attempt to restore the fundamental role that religious experience could play in shaping nineteenth-century American approaches to natural space. By tracing the ways that Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Vachel Lindsay all variously responded to Swedenborgian thought, Zuber illuminates the complex dynamic that came to unfold between the religious, the literary, and the ecological.

About this title

About the Author

Devin P. Zuber is Associate Professor of American Studies, Religion, and Literature at Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813943515
• ISBN 13: 9780813943510
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 266