This thesis investigates the turn to a neo-revivalist Muslim identity in the West as a form of self-othering. The binary dichotomy of self and other is used as a framework for the apparent divide between Muslims and the West. Second and third-generation disapora neo-revivalists personalise religion and through their hermeneutics seek an expression of religion that transcends cultural practice. They self-other in a way reactionary to society, and also react to the religion of their parents’ generation, which for them is not spiritual enough and instead is too steeped in cultural practices. Secularism and the post-secular turn is considered in Western society to provide context to the West that these neo-revivalists are located within. The diversity of Muslims is investigated to contextualise the neo-revivalist shift, which rather than being tolerant of diversity amongst Muslims seeks a separation of culture from religion. As second- and third-generation diaspora Muslims are the children of Muslim migrants to the West, the inter-generational divide is investigated. First-generation migrants have a continuity to their religious expression based on their experiences within the country of origin, whereas second- and third-generation migrants engage in a re-negotiation process to enable their religiosity to be relevant to Western societies. Qualitative case studies relating to the performance of religious identity, that is necessarily public, are utilised from Britain and the United States to further contextualise neo-revivalism. Literary mediation and mediatisation are examined in the context and globalisation. Contemporary literature is utilised to consider the self-critique of issues relating to integration and assimilation of Muslims in Western society by Muslims in Western societies. These cosmopolitan voices provide an internal understanding of the issues involved. Media-technologies have enabled a wide range of discourses to circulate about the current geopolitic following ‘9/11’ and Muslims themselves have utilised these mediated-technologies, and as such, neo-revivalism is necessarily a product of time, place and circumstance. Finally, a conclusion is reached and in seeking to understand the neo-revivalist turn and the place of Muslims in the West, a cosmopolitan ethic of integration is proposed that seeks to turn away from essentialisations and binary oppositions, but instead, through an engagement in respectful and reflexive critical dialogue, it is hoped that our shared universal humanity may be realised.

Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871-1949) was a Spanish-born polymath who, though mostly remembered for his historically inspired fashion designs, was first trained as a painter in Paris and would become a lighting and set designer, photographer, costume designer, and inventor. Working in Venice at the turn of the 20th century with an insatiable appetite for the historic, the notoriously secretive artist was often called a magician. Fortuny was able to produce a realistic night sky using his own electric stage lighting system. He inverted traditional photographic processes by printing horizontally with natural light from the window in his darkroom. And his most enigmatic creation is a series of rarely seen photographic prints made in a lightless process where mounds of damp fabric were pressed onto sensitized paper to form an abstract multiplicity of wrinkles. Despite being an inventor who relied on technological advancements and experiments, Fortuny’s deeply historical temperament is evident in his own declaration: ‘Nothing is new in this world, so I do not pretend to bring new ideas’.He invented a machine for permanently pressing the Classical pleats of his delicate silk Delphos gown and with painted stencilling he re-created the glittering patterns of woven brocades and damasks from the Italian Renaissance – often copied from 16th-century painting. Marcel Proust utilized these garments, which remained largely unchanged over forty years of production, as Venetian emblems of memory in À la recherche du temps perdu, where they conjure Carpaccio’s exquisitely painted velvet robes. Inspired by classical Greece and Renaissance Italy, amongst other eras, Fortuny was wildly historic in the way he brought together forms and patterns from disparate times and places. Invoking Michel Serres’ illustration of multitemporality as a crumpled handkerchief, ‘Reviving Fortuny’s Phantasmagorias’ argues that Fortuny’s sense of time (like Proustian time) is pleated time – where the past touches the present. This thesis utilizes the concept of phantasmagoria in multiple ways. The antique-filled Gothic palazzo in which Fortuny lived and worked, which like the 19th-century interiors that Walter Benjamin describes, manifests a phantasmagoric layering of past upon present. ‘Reviving Fortuny’s Phantasmagorias’ also employs Theodor Adorno’s writing on Wagnerian opera and Marina Warner’s historicised account of phantasmagoria to apply the term to Fortuny’s stage lighting designs, clothing, and photography. The thesis follows Fortuny’s self-assessment that he was ‘first and foremost a painter’ to argue that it was ‘as a painter’ that he thought of light throughout his work across various media. Though he is often relegated to footnotes in the large bodies of scholarship on Proust and Wagner, ‘Reviving Fortuny’s Phantasmagorias’ centres on Fortuny and his work in Venice (a pivotal point of intersection for all three): the watery city of both memory and desire, of flickering golden light and dark, damp shadows. This thesis argues that Fortuny, as a revivalist, accessed the past through art objects and material visual culture, in his personal collection and from reproductions, to re-create them in the early 20th century. His work is phantasmagoric because of the way it uses light and darkness, shadows and projections, and movement and colour to bring historical images to life, bringing together a multiplicity of times. Though these themes are easily identifiable in Fortuny’s work, they have yet to be traced throughout his oeuvre in any major piece of writing.

This dissertation examines the life and work of Charles Ewing Brown (1883-1971), an influential twentieth-century leader of the Church of God (Anderson, IN). During his editorship of the Gospel Trumpet from 1930 to 1951, Brown reinterpreted Christian doctrine in ways that often challenged predominant evangelical and fundamentalist theologies of the mid-twentieth century. Although often associated with theological developments in the nineteenth century, the holiness movement impacted the twentieth century in significant ways, concurrent with the contributions of pentecostalism and neo-evangelicalism. In the late 1950s, a prominent mainline leader heralded the rise of the “Third Force in Christendom,” which prioritized an experiential and primitivist faith that was not encapsulated in Roman Catholicism or historical Protestantism. Despite the presence of holiness groups like the Church of God in the Third Force, prevailing historical narratives of the mid-twentieth century have prioritized the importance of the Reformed fundamentalist tradition associated with Baptists and Presbyterians. In contrast, Brown’s holiness fundamentalism rejected the premillennialism and cultural separatism that prevail in most historians’ depiction of the tradition. Overall, Brown complicates how historians have understood terms such as fundamentalist and evangelical. This work offers a nuanced historical account by showing how a significant holiness leader inherited and modified the beliefs and practices of formative traditions. Through a survey of monographs, editorials, and addresses, this dissertation foregrounds the foundations and implications of Brown’s claim of being an evangelical and a fundamentalist. It begins with a biographical chapter and successive chapters explore how Brown’s outlook informed his view of revivalism and doctrine, his ecclesiology, his critique of premillennialism, his articulation of the social dimensions of Christianity, and his socio-political commentary. The conclusion contextualizes Brown and analyzes his historiographical significance. For Brown, the evangelical and fundamentalist disposition was primarily communal, and the prevailing trend toward hyper-individualism and separation deeply concerned him. By challenging the assumptions about the conservative nature of evangelicalism and the epistemological foundation of fundamentalism, this study offers an initial foray into how holiness groups shaped the contours of twentieth-century American Christianity. It reveals Brown’s continuity with nineteenth-century evangelical social reform efforts and with late twentieth-century progressive evangelicals.

This thesis contends that youth from age twelve to twenty-five played a pivotal role in the revivals of the Second Great Awakening in New York and New England. Rather than merely being passive onlookers in these religious renewals, the youth were active participants, influencing the frequency, spread, and intensity of the Christian revivals. Relying heavily upon personal accounts written by youth and revival records from various denominations, this work examines adolescent religious experiences during the first half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 explores the impact parents had on youth religiosity, showing how the teaching and examples they saw in their homes built the religious foundation for young people. The next chapter discusses how the youth continued to build upon what they were taught in their homes by seeking for personal conversion experiences. This chapter contends that conversion experiences were the crucial spiritual turning point in the lives of young people, and explores how they were prepared for and reacted to these experiences. Chapter 3 outlines personal worship among the youth and describes the specific tactics that churches implemented in helping convert and strengthen the young. As churches used revival meetings and clergy-youth relationships to fortify these converts, young people implemented the same practices in helping their peers. Finally, chapter 4 utilizes revival records and Methodist church data to provide quantitative evidence of the widespread and crucial role that young people had in influencing revivals. Understanding the widespread impact of these youth on nineteenth-century revivals provides new insight into the ways in which young people impacted the greater social, religious, and culture changes sweeping across America at the time.

This dissertation contributes to the study of American Christianity by tracing the apocalyptic thought of New England evangelical Calvinism from Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) to Lyman Beecher (1775-1863). Covering the period of the First Great Awakening in the eighteenth century to the dawn of the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century, the study identifies Edwards as the progenitor of a distinctive tradition of Calvinist apocalyptic thought. Edwardsean historical-redemptive apocalypticism highlights the “work of redemption” as the unfolding spiritual drama of conversion enacted in various historical stages. Its three-fold emphasis is on revivalism, the afflictive nature of church history, and the cosmic dimensions of an overarching redemptive narrative culminating in Christ’s Second Coming. Edwards’s immediate disciples, Joseph Bellamy (1719-1790) and Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), reinterpreted their mentor’s insights to create an Edwardsean school of New England “New Divinity” thought. Beneath the veneer of New Divinity theology was a strong undercurrent of Edwardsean apocalypticism, which the second generation Edwardseans adapted to reflect the young nation’s call to social action. The revivals of the Second Great Awakening were driven in large part by the millennial spirit of this New Divinity apocalyptic tradition. Due to rapid societal changes at the turn of the century, Edwardseans of the third generation led the efforts in institutionalizing religious and moral reform activities. Along with this Protestant “kingdom building” came a shift in Edwardsean eschatological priorities. It moved away from the central Edwardsean motif of conversion/redemption to moralism—from a theology centered upon otherworldly apocalypticism toward a greater focus on societal reform. This transition from subsuming the grand narrative of redemption under the overall rubric of God’s sovereignty to one that viewed the millennium in relation to humanistic moral reform was led by Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), who serves as the representative of the “millennial turn” in Edwardsean apocalypticism during the Second Great Awakening. An overview of Edwardsean apocalyptic thought between the two Great Awakenings provides historians an important window to connect and interpret the development of New England Calvinist eschatology that few have explored in depth. These ideas continue to enlighten our understanding of modern-day iterations of evangelical eschatology.

This thesis is about the scalar paradoxes of islands as seen through the cultural movement of a small island nation in the nineteenth century. As the divide between Celticism and Teutonism grew in Britain, the cultural movement of the Isle of Man created a hybrid heritage of both. Antiquarians, archaeologists, and cultural activists that were settled in the island organised themselves for the preservation and eventually revitalisation of a Manx past, in communication with scholars in the British Isles and the North. By investigating three major societies from this movement; the Manx Society (1858), the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society (1879) and the Manx Language Society (1899); this thesis follows the development of a national exceptionalism through their selective identification with Nordic, Celtic, and British spaces, caught in between a Western large state ideal of progress and its antithesis: the imaginative geography of an isolated island. Lefebvrian theory shows that their navigation in a past of Celtic settlers and Viking invaders led to a multifunctional transnational history that could be transferred and repurposed for opposing social spaces. It is argued that this transnationalism functioned as cultural shelter, in accordance with how political and economic shelter from larger states has proven successful for small island nations. It shows that if Manx history was to be regarded as a legitimate and valuable addition to the history of nations in the late nineteenth century, it required manifold connections abroad that could be translated to different transnational agendas. And while this type of (trans-) national exceptionalism was adapted to their situation as a small island nation, its inherent co-dependency on transnational connections was only enforcing an inferiority complex within existing hierarchies in Northern European history.

This thesis examines narratives of the events called ”The War of Religion in Kvistbro”, a violent turmoil that erupted in Närke, Sweden 1843. The events involved persons connected to the Shouter Movement, a pietist inspired revivalist movement, and governmental officials who were ordered to arrest a preacher.A narrative analysis based on a model inspired by Labov and Chatman, is used for examining contemporary local newspaper Nerikes Allehanda's and the revivalist historian E. J.Ekman's narrations of the events. The theoretical framework of this thesis is founded on Charles Tilly's theory of collective violence, and James C Scott's theories of hidden transcripts and weapons of the weak.The results of the analysis indicates that there are three main understandings of the events within the empiric material: a religious framing, a medical framing, and a socio-political reading. The socio-political reading of the narratives implies that the concepts medicine as control, social antagonism, and gender-coded aspects of conflict, emerge from the material.

In the past two decades or so, feminist historians have sifted through the copious illustrations of the turbulent, emotion-ridden years of early nineteenth-century American revivalism to devote considerable attention to the rise of female evangelism. Despite the notable upsurge, scholars generally remain untutored about the plethora of powerful female preachers who devoted their lives to advancing the kingdom of God. This dissertation seeks to resurrect the voice of one such woman: Dorothy Ripley (1767- 1831), an evangelist from Whitby, England, whose personal and evangelical awakening rivaled the revolutionary power of the revivalism sweeping the new Republic. Citing her direct mandate from God to preach, Dorothy grasped religion and reshaped it into a spiritually, culturally, and politically altering device. She became the first woman to preach before the U.S. Congress, composed five literary volumes (most of which she published herself and in multiple editions), crossed the Atlantic as many as nineteen times, and traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard to preach among the different levels of society in a variety of settings. As an unlicensed, unsanctioned preacher, Dorothy defied powerful social and religious conventions by her solitary travel, scriptural exegesis, public performances, and presumption of the patriarchally assigned and protected role of preacher. She strove to proclaim the gospel even at the expense of reputation, family ties, home and hearth, marriage and motherhood, and personal security. Her rebelliousness allowed her to rise above the backstage role commonly assigned to, and accepted by, women of the early Republic. Her works serve as cultural artifacts by providing eyewitness accounts spotlighting the problems inherent in the formative years of a Republic reeling with the headiness of self-rule: the tension between Protestantism and American capitalism, the conflict between an emerging elite and the increasingly dissatisfied lower class, the misogyny of the cult of domesticity and separate spheres, the embryonic stages of widespread social reform, and the virulent ethnocentrism of the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny. Through an examination of her spiritual autobiographies, this dissertation seeks to enrich scholarly understanding of women’s influence in the evolution of evangelization, abolitionism, women’s rights, and social service.

The subject of this dissertation is the confessional revivalist organisation Evangeliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen (EFS – approximately the Swedish Evangelical Mission Society) between 1856 and 1910. EFS was founded in 1856 in a Pietistic tradition, and its aim was to revitalise from within what was seen as a too dormant State church, and also to counteract the influence of the emerging free churches. The study has five main sections. The introductory part consists of the theoretical framework and the historical context. In the second chapter EFS’ aims and expectations are studied on a national level. The third chapter examines the content of published and distributed tracts. The fourth chapter focuses on the activities of the itinerant colporteurs, and the fifth and final part studies the work of a local EFS-congregation. The aim of the dissertation is twofold. The first objective is to describe the transformation EFS underwent during the period studied. This process is described in terms related to Jürgen Habermas’ expression “public sphere”. When EFS was founded, as a board, it can be seen as one of other middle- and upper-class associations, and as such a part of the Swedish public sphere. By 1910 EFS had begun to move away from the Swedish State church and had become more like contemporary popular movements and free churches – it had started to take the shape of an limited alternative sphere, a denomination. The second aim is to use EFS as an example to describe and analyse the changed perception of religion during the second half of the 19th century. This change is described as a process of secularisation. Secularisation is seen here as the process that turned religion into an individual, voluntary and optional act of faith, among other religious and non-religious alternatives, for ordinary people. Of particular interest is the paradoxical relation between revivalism and secularisation. Various revivalist movements emphasised the personal relation to God and the individual right to interpret the word of God. The individual choice for salvation was also stressed within revivalism. These movements also created new alternatives to the all-embracing State church. Thus both the position of the Church, and the universal claims of Christianity in general, were undermined. The transformation EFS underwent is seen as an adaptation to the rise of modern society, which became more pluralistic and hence competitive during the final decades of the 19th century. This development meant that new strategies were required for religious organisations overall, in order for them to be able to compete and flourish. / digitalisering@umu

This thesis is set within a framework of the revivalist Christians’ Inner Mission, and presents as a case-study their mission to conscripts stationed in military exercise areas and garrison towns across Sweden. The revivalists’ evangelical zeal is given special attention. This is in contrast to much of the earlier research, which worked with the secularization paradigm formulated by the founders of sociology. Conscription in the early 20th century was regarded in various civilian and military circles as a platform for social and national integration, although these attitudes remain largely unstudied in Sweden’s case. Those engaged in missionizing the army were also drawn to this ‘School of the Nation’. The thesis shows that the motives of those involved in this home mission to soldiers were grounded in religion. However, the expansive missionary work was strengthened by the positions held by its male protagonists in the power structures of society. The mission was maintained by social contacts between an informal alliance of upper-class officers from among the mission’s military members, and by civilian missionaries from lower social classes. A decisive contextual factor for the army-mission as an educational project was that Sweden remained at peace. The civilian contribution to the mission grew as it spread more widely through the country. It is argued in this thesis that the soldiers’ homes were dominated by a discourse of domesticity. This discourse designated a place, a relationship, and a state of mind for the conscript during his free time at the military base. The missionaries were convinced that contact with the domestic and family values of civilian society should be preserved by the soldiers’ homes. The discourse of domesticity also looked ahead to the conscript’s subsequent life in civilian society: the missionaries wished to train up conscripts to be sober, moral family breadwinners.