Forgotten Nineteenth-Century American Literature of Religious Conversion

Abstract

The article examines the vision of Catholicism in the fiction of J. V. Huntington, an Episcopal clergyman who converted to Catholicism in 1849 through the influence of the Oxford Movement. Huntington wrote several Catholic novels during the 1850s that won him contemporary recognition. His view of Catholicism was very different than either the republican Catholicism that emerged from the Maryland Tradition or the ethnic Catholicism of nineteenth-century urban ghettos, an indication that the views of converts, like other Catholics sitting outside of the mainstream of modern scholarly models, complicate significantly the story of American Catholicism.