The Devil and Doctor Dwight

Satire and Theology in the Early American Republic

By:

Colin Wells

Format:

Paperback / softback

Series:

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

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At the close of the eighteenth century, Timothy Dwight - poet, clergyman, and, later, president of Yale College - waged a literary and intellectual war against the forces of ""infidelity."" The Devil and Doctor Dwight reexamines this episode by focusing on The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), the verse satire that launched Dwight's campaign and, Colin Wells argues, the key to recovering the deeper meaning of the threat of infidelity in the early years of the American republic. Modeled after Alexander Pope's satiric masterpiece, the Dunciad, Dwight's poem took aim at a number of his contemporaries, but its principal target was Congregationalist Charles Chauncy, author of a controversial treatise asserting ""the salvation of all men."" To Dwight's mind, a belief in universal salvation issued from the same naive faith in innate human virtue and inevitable progress that governed all forms of Enlightenment thought, political as well as religious. Indeed, in subsequent works he traced with increasing dismay a shift in the idea of universal salvation from a theological doctrine to a political belief and symbol of American national identity. In this light, Dwight's campaign against infidelity must also be seen as an early and prescient critique of the ideological underpinnings of Jeffersonian democracy.

Author Biography:

COLIN WELLS is associate professor of English at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Release date Australia

April 30th, 2002

Author

Colin Wells

Audiences

Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Professional & Vocational
Undergraduate

Edition

New edition

Pages

272

Series

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

Dimensions

156x235x16

ISBN-13

9780807853832

Product ID

6202351

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