‘What they Seek for is in Themselves’

Quaker Language and Thought in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Bibliographic Data

ID22314465
AuthorsJ Peacock (0000-0003-2028-1471, Keele University, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume12
Issue2
Pages196-215
Publication date2008-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueQuaker Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1363-013X • E-ISSN: 2397-1770
PublisherOpen Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3828/quaker.12.2.196
OpenAlexW788896424
LanguageEN
References cited11

This paper argues that Quakerism was an important influence on a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers. Looking at the work of, amongst others, Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Greenleaf Whittier, it demonstrates that both the stereotyped depiction of Quakers and the use of Quaker ideas, such as the inward light in literature of the period, helped writers tackle some of the paradoxes of democracy in a young nation. The perceived mystery of Quaker individualism is used in these texts first to dramatise anxiety over the formation of American ‘character’ as either fundamentally unique and unknowable or representative of the whole nation, and secondly for more constructive ends in order to create a language able to express unity in diversity

Aesthetics · American literature · Art · Constructive · Depiction · Individualism · Literature · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Anthropology · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment

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