Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism. By Rodger M. Payne. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998. x, 123 pp. $27.00, isbn 1-57233-015-5.)

This compact monograph offers a postmodern interpretation of American Puritan and early evangelical spiritual autobiographies, grounded in the literary theory of Michel Foucault and the history of religion methodology of Victor W. Turner. In five brief but effective chapters, Rodger M. Payne challenges the traditional view that conversion narratives were simply didactic formulations of standard beliefs. Drawing on more than fifty conversion narratives from Thomas Shepard to Peter Cartwright, he argues that such texts made an important contribution to the construction of the modern American self through their discursive interplay of authorial subjectivity, paradoxical religious ideas, experiential rhetoric, and ritual sensibility. . . .

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