Emancipation & Authenticity: forms and fictions of Gnostic selfhood In nineteenth-century United States’ literature

My dissertation unearths how Gnosticism serves as the lynchpin in an alliance between Protestant Christianity and secularity in the United States. “Gnosticism”—an ancient quasi-Christian belief in earthly salvation—highlights the relevance of individualism for the development of religion and secularity in the United States of the nineteenth-century. As my starting point for this line of inquiry, I define Gnosticism as a revolutionary formation within Christianity, characterized by an impulse for individuals to attain an unmediated relationship with the divine, while simultaneously rendering the inhabited world—including fellow persons—into abstractions to whom the Gnostic believer bears minimal responsibility. It is my hope to bring literary representations of the relationship between the self and world—and the ramifications of that relationship for secularity—to bear upon political philosophy and theory. Literature brings to light dynamism, ambivalence and paradox—all persistent features of everyday life—in a fashion that is often absent from the systematizing efforts of political philosophy and theory. To the rich body of scholarship analyzing the shape and history of religion in the United States, my dissertation contributes a literary account of the uneven self-secularizing process undergone by Christianity during the nineteenth-century.