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.