"This book explores the ways in which the interplay of religion and education fostered the concepts of self-culture and social reform and shows how such interplay helped construct varying epistemologies, individualities, and discourse communities. Mark Vasquez traces the evolution of self-culture from a theological concept to an educational and literary one.

Drawing on examples ranging from late-eighteenth-century epistolary novels and religious pamphlets to temperance texts, essays, and late-nineteenth-century sentimental novels, he shows how writers applied prevailing languages of power to promote the sweeping changes that churches and schools seemed incapable of carrying out by themselves.

As a reformative force, the literary text encouraged activism among all its readers, but affected (and was affected by) women more profoundly than, and differently from, men.".

"Vasquez examines the Unitarian-Transcendental tradition as represented in the works of William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller, and the Calvinist-Evangelical line of the Beechers. Despite philosophical and stylistic differences between the two schools, Vasquez shows that there was mutual influence in the evolving New England discourse of self-culture.

By reconsidering changes in religious, educational, and literary cultures in terms of the construction of individual and community identity, he demonstrates that authority and reform arose as the most pervasive social concerns of that era. A final chapter considers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott as inheritors of these respective legacies, urging their female readers to temper self-culture with self-sacrifice and to move beyond the domestic sphere toward an epicene community."--BOOK JACKET.