Religious Publishing and the Intellectual Climate of New York City as a Space of Literary Production

Damien B. Schlarb will focus on the decades following the 1830s, when American Northeastern city’s vibrant literary scene combined versions of New England intellectualism and spiritualism with versions of commercial... [ view full abstract ]

Damien B. Schlarb will focus on the decades following the 1830s, when American Northeastern city’s vibrant literary scene combined versions of New England intellectualism and spiritualism with versions of commercial enterprise and capital gamesmanship. Cityscapes such as New York created a climate of intellectual exchange about religious ideas that was both pugnacious and diverse by providing, for instance, public fora (lectures and publications) in which gradations of skeptical and pious thought confronted each other. Urban writers who existed in this climate often reflected these complex and multifarious debates in their writing, arguably because they were part of their everyday experience. Schlarb will sketch the contours of what he calls New York’s irreligious publishing scene. Schlarb shows how the publishers of skeptical material deployed many of the same promotional strategies as the religious press to achieve circulation. Appreciating these strategies and the circulation of ideas they enable can help us understand the heterogeneous intellectual climate of the city and reassess the covert and overt religious and skeptical commentary in some of our major canonical works and authors. Doing so also allows us to question some of the persistent categorical boundaries that separate supposedly skeptical writers such as Herman Melville from more explicitly evangelical authors, such as Elizabeth Phelps, Susan Warner, or Harriet Beecher Stowe.