“Christian Science and American Literary History”

Squires, L. Ashley. “Christian Science and American Literary History.” Literature Compass 13, no. 4 (2016): 227-35.

Squires observes that “literary scholarship related to Christian Science has been extremely flawed, due mostly to over-reliance on a few problematic sources” (227).  She documents in detail the controversial biographies of Mary Baker Eddy by McClure’s Magazine and by Mark Twain, their reliance on common dubious sources, and how they were allowed to “metastasize” (231) in the ensuing literature on Eddy. But with emerging scholarly interest in late 19^th-century religious movements, and with the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library, literary scholars can responsibly take into account “the historiographies of the religions they study” (228). For example, the past trend to frame Eddy’s Christian Science as mainly a precursor of New Thought created a narrative where “the tolerant and eclectic New Thought proponents are liberated from Eddy’s doctrinaire teachings” (228). But with increasing access to the Library archives, scholars are revealing the uniqueness of Christian Science, as well as “its importance for understanding early 20^th-century intellectual culture” (228). Scholars too often notice Christian Science only through its myriad connections to literary history. But only with attention to its history, doctrines, and distinctions will there by an “honest and accurate account for the literature that seeks to represent or critique them” (230).

ISSN: 1741-4113

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12322

View this resource on Academia.edu (you must create an account, but it’s free).

See also annotations

A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion by Catherine L. Albanese

Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America by Rennie B. Schoepflin

Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1915 by Beryl Satter

Mary Baker Eddy by Gillian Gill

“Mary Baker Eddy and Sentimental Womanhood” by Gail Parker

“Mary Baker Eddy and the Nineteenth-Century ‘Public’ Woman: A Feminist Reappraisal” by Jean McDonald

Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism by Stephen Gottschalk

“The Ambiguous Feminism of Mary Baker Eddy” by Susan Hill Lindley

The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine by Anne Harrington

The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life by Stephen Gottschalk

“The Mother Church: Mary Baker Eddy and the Practice of Sentimentalism” by Claudia Stokes

“Writing Revelation: Mary Baker Eddy and Her Early Editions of Science and Health” by Amy B. Voorhees