New England Watch and Ward Society

Name: New England Watch and Ward Society
Brand: OXFORD UNIV PR
Availability: OutOfStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

By Kemeny, P. C.

0 - Default Title

Description

The New England Watch and Ward Society provides a new window into the history of the Protestant establishment's prominent role in late nineteenth-century public life and its confrontation with modernity, commercial culture, and cultural pluralism in early twentieth-century America. Elite liberal Protestants, typically considered progressive, urbane, and tolerant, established the Watch and Ward Society in 1878 to suppress literature they deemed obscene, notably including Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. These self-appointed custodians of Victorian culture enjoyed widespread support from many of New England's most renowned ministers, distinguished college presidents, respected social reformers, and wealthy philanthropists. In the 1880s, the Watch and Ward Society expanded its efforts to regulate public morality by attacking gambling and prostitution. The society not only expressed late nineteenth-century Victorian American values about what constituted "good literature," sexual morality, and public duty, it also embodied Protestants' efforts to promote these values in an increasingly intellectually and culturally diverse society. By 1930, the Watch and Ward Society had suffered a very public fall from grace. Following controversies over the suppression of H.L. Mencken's American Mercury as well as popular novels such as Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, cultural modernists, civil libertarians, and publishers attacked the moral reform movement, ridiculing its leaders' privileged backgrounds, social idealism, and religious commitments. Their critique reshaped the dynamics of Protestant moral reform activity as well as public discourse in subsequent decades. For more than a generation, however, the Watch and Ward Society expressed mainline Protestant attitudes toward literature, gambling, and sexuality.

Product details

Edition:: 1
Number of Pages:: 410
Release Date:: 2018-01-02
Publication Date:: 2018-01-02
Publisher:: OXFORD UNIV PR
Languages:: Original: English
ISBN10:: 0190844396
ISBN13:: 9780190844394
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:: [email protected]
Weight:: 778 g
Height:: 161 cm
Width:: 240 cm
Thickness:: 27 cm

Buy on Amazon

Currently sold out