|
|
Article: "Pious Cant" and Blasphemy: Fanny Fern's Radicalized Sentiment.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
- Article date:
- January 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 University of Nebraska Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
For contemporary readers who find nineteenth-century culture smotheringly conventional, Fanny Fern seems an enigmatically modern voice--funny, courageous, and disrespectful. She criticizes traditional Christian ministers, the "listless and blundering clerical expositors--many of whom offer us a Procrustean bed of theology, too short for any healthy creature of God to stretch himself upon" (Fresh Leaves 90). By exposing the materialism of the pious, Fern demonstrates over and over that for many, the "contents of [the] pocket-book" are the most important, at the expense of widows, orphans, immigrants, and the poor (Fern Leaves, First Series 18).
But unlike other ...
Related newspaper, magazine, and journal articles:
|