Loving in Plain Sight: Amish Romance Novels as Evangelical Gothic
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Date
2013-10
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Ohio State University. Libraries
Abstract
This article examines Beverly Lewis’s highly popular trilogy The Heritage of Lancaster County,
a series often cited as inspiring the Amish romance novel trend. Although Lewis did not invent
the Amish romance, the high visibility that her work enjoys in the media, and the conventional
wisdom that she was the first to develop the genre, means that subsequent novels are necessarily
responding to and adapting Lewis’s texts. Looking at Lewis’s trilogy as a foundational text, this
article analyzes the ways in which it draws on Gothic conventions to perform evangelical
cultural work (to use Jane Tompkins’s phrase). Considering the trilogy as a Gothic text within the
context of Christian publishing highlights the ways in which it functions as an extension of
evangelical outreach: the narratives both celebrate Amish community values and adherence to
tradition while using Gothic tropes of confinement and escape to emphasize the idea that the
Amish are narrow-minded and overly rigid. Ultimately, this article argues that Lewis’s novels use
the Gothic to argue that the antidote to Amish rigidity is evangelicalism.
Description
Keywords
Amish romance novels, the Gothic, Evangelicalism, Beverly Lewis
Citation
Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies v. 1, no. 2 (2013), p. 1-16.