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OverviewUnderstanding the culture of living with hymnbooks offers new insight into the histories of poetry, literacy, and religious devotion. It stands barely three inches high, a small brick of a book. The pages are skewed a bit, and evidence of a small handprint remains on the worn, cheap leather covers that don’t quite close. The book bears the marks of considerable use. But why—and for whom—was it made? Christopher N. Phillips’s The Hymnal is the first study to reconstruct the practices of reading and using hymnals, which were virtually everywhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Isaac Watts invented a small, words-only hymnal at the dawn of the eighteenth century. For the next two hundred years, such hymnals were their owners’ constant companions at home, school, church, and in between. They were children's first books, slaves’ treasured heirlooms, and sources of devotional reading for much of the English-speaking world. Hymnals helped many people learn to memorize poetry and to read; they provided space to record family memories, pass notes in church, and carry everything from railroad tickets to holy cards to business letters. In communities as diverse as African Methodists, Reform Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and Unitarians, hymnals were integral to religious and literate life. An extended historical treatment of the hymn as a read text and media form, rather than a source used solely for singing, this book traces the lives people lived with hymnals, from obscure schoolchildren to Emily Dickinson. Readers will discover a wealth of connections between reading, education, poetry, and religion in Phillips’s lively accounts of hymnals and their readers. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Christopher N. PhillipsPublisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Imprint: Johns Hopkins University Press Dimensions: Width: 14.00cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 21.60cm Weight: 0.431kg ISBN: 9781421425924ISBN 10: 1421425920 Pages: 272 Publication Date: 26 September 2018 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order  Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Prologue: Looking for Hymns Introduction: A Reader’s Hymnbook Interlude 1. The Wide, Wide World of Hymns Part I. Church 1. How Hymnbooks Made a People 2. How to Fight with Hymnbooks 3. Hymnbooks at Church 4. Giving Hymnbooks, and What the Hymnbook Gives 5. Devotion and the Shape of the Hymnbook Interlude 2. Philadelphia, 1844 Part II. School 6. Hymnbooks and Literacy Learning 7. How Hymnbooks Made Children’s Literature 8. How Hymns Remade Schoolbooks 9. Singing as Reading; or, A Tale of Two Sacred Harps Interlude 3. Henry Ward Beecher Takes Note Part III. Home 10. Did Poets Write Hymns? 11. How Poems Entered the Hymnbook 12. The Return of the Private Hymnbook 13. Emily Dickinson’s Hymnody of Privacy Epilogue: The Hymnological Decade Glossary of Bibliographic Terms Notes IndexReviewsUnlike modern hymnals, which are larger and heavier and more expensively produced, older hymnbooks were affordable and designed to be read. People dog-eared them, wrote notes in them, learned to read with them and gave them as gifts to children and relatives. These homely little volumes, Mr. Phillips rightly contends, filled an important and mostly overlooked role in forging America's Anglo-Protestant worldview and shaping America's literary sensibilities. -- Barton Swaim * Wall Street Journal * ... continual thought-provoking insights transcending national boundaries. -- Timothy Dudley-Smith * The Hymn Society Bulletin * . . . continual thought-provoking insights transcending national boundaries. -- Timothy Dudley-Smith * The Hymn Society Bulletin * Unlike modern hymnals, which are larger and heavier and more expensively produced, older hymnbooks were affordable and designed to be read. People dog-eared them, wrote notes in them, learned to read with them and gave them as gifts to children and relatives. These homely little volumes, Mr. Phillips rightly contends, filled an important and mostly overlooked role in forging America's Anglo-Protestant worldview and shaping America's literary sensibilities. -- Barton Swaim * Wall Street Journal * Unlike modern hymnals, which are larger and heavier and more expensively produced, older hymnbooks were affordable and designed to be read. People dog-eared them, wrote notes in them, learned to read with them and gave them as gifts to children and relatives. These homely little volumes, Mr. Phillips rightly contends, filled an important and mostly overlooked role in forging America's Anglo-Protestant worldview and shaping America's literary sensibilities. -- Barton Swaim * Wall Street Journal * Author InformationChristopher N. Phillips is an associate professor of English at Lafayette College. He is the author of Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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