In nineteenth-century America, “apocalypse” referred not to the end of the world but to sacred revelation, and “geography” meant both the physical landscape and its representation in printed maps, atlases, and pictures. In Apocalyptic Geographies, Jerome Tharaud explores how white Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to present the antebellum landscape as a “sacred space” of spiritual pilgrimage, and how devotional literature influenced secular society in important and surprising ways.
Reading across genres and media—including religious tracts and landscape paintings, domestic fiction and missionary memoirs, slave narratives and moving panoramas—Apocalyptic Geographies illuminates intersections of popular culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the spiritual narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. Placing works of literature and visual art—from Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—into new contexts, Tharaud traces the rise of evangelical media, the controversy and backlash it engendered, and the role it played in shaping American modernity.
Awards and Recognition
- Finalist for the Religion and the Arts Book Award, American Academy of Religion
Jerome Tharaud is assistant professor of English at Brandeis University.
"[A] rich analysis of the convergence of apocalypse, geography, and media in modernity."—Emilie Casey, Reading Religion
"This pioneering work offers a new and striking account of the relation between evangelical media and secular society. Jerome Tharaud tells a riveting story about modernity growing out of religious tracts, slave narratives, landscape paintings, and moving panoramas, as well as fiction. A spirited rejoinder to Benedict Anderson and Arjun Appadurai."—Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
"In the best tradition of American cultural history, Jerome Tharaud has produced a superbly researched account of space—from landscape to mediascape to the cultural work of republican geography. Drawing on fiction, painting, religion, and mass print, Tharaud takes readers on a great road trip through American history, tracing the conviction that nationhood and space are the providential registers of an encompassing narrative."—David Morgan, Duke University
“In this wide-ranging study of antebellum aesthetic forms, Jerome Tharaud examines how print and visual media, even the landscape itself, revealed sacred meanings as an impending crisis loomed over the United States. With its rich survey of 'evangelical space,' Apocalyptic Geographies stands as an example of authoritative scholarship that fuses religion and faith to modern notions of media.”—Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin–Madison
“Tharaud has written an insightful and richly textured account of how Protestants used a spectrum of artistic forms to deepen their sense of a divine presence and providence in their lives. Apocalyptic Geographies is a truly impressive accomplishment.”—Paul C. Gutjahr, Indiana University
“Blending theoretical sophistication with meticulous historical detail and close textual interpretation, Apocalyptic Geographies makes a powerful case for the vital importance of religion to Americanist scholarship.”—Hsuan L. Hsu, University of California, Davis
