Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Rivers, Isabel, author

Title Vanity Fair and the Celestial City : dissenting, Methodist, and evangelical literary culture in England, 1720-1800 / Isabel Rivers
Published Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2018

Copies

Description 1 online resource
Contents pt. I BOOKS AND THEIR READERS -- 1. Principal Booksellers and Publishing Outlets -- Congregationalists -- Methodists -- Church of England Evangelicals -- Major London Dissenting Booksellers -- Booksellers for Smaller Denominations -- Provincial Printers and Booksellers -- 2. Religious Societies for Distributing Books -- Welsh Trust -- Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge -- Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor -- Society for Distributing Religious Tracts among the Poor -- Unitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge -- Religious Tract Society -- Appendix: Unitarian Tract Collections -- 3. Reading -- Advice about Reading -- Access to Books -- Accounts of Reading -- Appendix: John Wesley's ̀Directions How to Read' -- pt. II SOURCES -- 4. Nonconformist Inheritance -- Favourite Nonconformist Authors -- Richard Baxter's Practical Works -- John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress -- 5. Episcopalian Inheritance -- Favourite Episcopalian Authors -- Henry Scougal's The Life of God in the Soul of Man -- 6. Roman Catholic Influences -- John Wesley's Catholic Editions -- Quaker Catholic Editions -- 7. North American Connexions -- Jonathan Edwards -- David Brainerd -- pt. III LITERARY KINDS -- 8. Interpreting the Bible -- Advice about Bible Reading -- Biblical Adaptation and Exploitation -- Bible and the Classics -- Commentaries and Annotated Bibles -- 9. Practical Works -- Sermons and Prayers -- Major Devotional Handbooks -- 10. Lives and Letters -- Collections of Lives -- Letters -- Diaries and Journals -- Ministerial Lives -- Lay Lives -- 11. Poems and Hymns -- Hymn Collections -- Publishing and Editing Poems and Hymns -- Uses of Hymns and Poems -- Epilogue
Summary This work explores the works written, edited, abridged, and promoted by evangelical dissenters, Methodists both Arminian and Calvinist, and Church of England evangelicals in the period 1720 to 1800. Isabel Rivers also looks back to earlier sources and forward to the continued republication of many of these works well into the nineteenth century. The first part is concerned with the publishing and distribution of religious books by commercial booksellers and not-for-profit religious societies, and the means by which readers obtained them and how they responded to what they read. The second part shows that some of the most important publications were new versions of earlier nonconformist, episcopalian, Roman Catholic, and North American works. The third part explores the main literary kinds, including annotated bibles, devotional guides, exemplary lives, and hymns. Building on many years' research into the religious literature of the period, Rivers discusses over two hundred writers and provides detailed case studies of popular and influential works
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Christian literature, English -- History and criticism -- 18th century
Evangelicalism in literature.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
English literature
Evangelicalism in literature
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780192542625
0192542621
9780191851209
0191851205