Evangelicals and Aesthetics from the 1750's to the 1930's

This unique book aims to provide the first extended account of the

intellectual history of aesthetic discourse among British and American

evangelicals from the awakening of a modern aesthetic consciousness

in the eighteenth century to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy

of the early twentieth century. Drawing on an extensive but largely

forgotten body of periodical source materials, it seeks to map the

evangelical aesthetic tradition's intellectual terrain, to highlight its

connections to other philosophical discourses, and to assess some of

its theological implications. In doing so, it challenges the still prevalent

stereotype of evangelicalism as aesthetically 'impoverished' and

devoid of serious reflection on the arts, offering instead a narrative

sensitive to the historical complexities of evangelical approaches to

aesthetic theory and criticism.