Chapter One lays out the broad conceptual stakes of the book’s argument, reviews the existing literature on Methodism, Romanticism, and women’s writing, and points to some of the modes of analysis that are pursued in the rest of the book. Furthermore, it lays out the rationale for examining women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Felicia Hemans, who would not have identified as evangelicals, in the context of evangelical women. The goal is not to trace influence, necessarily, but instead to examine how evangelical discourse came to permeate many different aspects of British culture. More broadly speaking this chapter explores of the stakes of the volume and lays out a conceptual framework for understanding how specific changes to the protocols of mediation that Methodists in general, and Methodist women in particular, pioneered can be mapped onto women’s writing more broadly during the long eighteenth-century.
