“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 19th-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 20th-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
Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America by Rennie B. Schoepflin
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
Related Annotations:
Annotations related by category:
- Availability: Online - Free
- Controversy: Lawsuits
- Controversy: Mark Twain
- Controversy: McClure’s Magazine (Milmine, Cather)
- Controversy: Plagiarism
- Controversy: Quimby-Eddy Debate
- Official Christian Science Publication: No
- Organizations: Mary Baker Eddy Library
- Organizations: The First Church of Christ, Scientist
- People: Cather, Willa
- People: Eddy, Mary Baker
- People: Milmine, Georgine
- People: Peabody, Frederick W.
- People: Quimby, Phineas
- People: Twain, Mark
- People: Woodbury, Josephine
- Publication Date: 2011-2020
- Resource Types: Article
- Resource Types: Web Resources
- Subjects: Biographies and Chronologies
- Subjects: Christian Science History after 1910
- Subjects: Christian Science Monitor
- Subjects: Polemic Literature and Responses
- Subjects: Social and Cultural Studies