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Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age (Paperback, 2nd ed.)
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Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age (Paperback, 2nd ed.)
Series: Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism
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Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age recounts Twain's
fascination with, and participation in, America's spiritual and
religious evolution in the 19th century and demonstrates how his
writing is better understood within it. Twain is often pictured as
a severe critic of religious piety, shaking his fist at God and
mocking the devout. Such a view, however, is only partly correct.
It ignores the social realities of Twain's major period as a writer
and his own spiritual interests: his participation in church
activities, his socially progressive agenda, his reliance on
religious themes in his major works, and his friendships with
clergymen, especially his pastor and best friend, Joe Twichell. It
also betrays a conception of religion that is more contemporary
than that of the period in which he lived.Harold K. Bush Jr.
highlights Twain's attractions to and engagements with the wide
variety of religious phenomena of America in his lifetime, and how
these matters affected his writings. Though Twain lived in an era
of tremendous religious vigor, it was also a time of upheaval and
crisis within the church. The rise of biological and psychological
sciences, the criticism of biblical texts as literary documents,
the influx of world religions and immigrant communities, and the
trauma of the Civil War all had dramatic effects on America's
religious life.At the same time mass urban revivalism, the
ecumenical movement, Social Christianity, and occultic phenomena
like spiritualism and mind sciences, all rushed in to fill the
voids. The rapid growth of agnosticism in the 1870s and 1880s is
also clearly reflected in Twain's life and writings. Thus Twain's
career reflects in an unusually resonant way the vast changes in
American belief during his lifetime. Bush's study offers a new and
more complicated understanding of Twain and his literary output,
and serves as the cultural biography of an era.
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