Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature: The Cultural Work of Literary Preaching from Emerson to Morrison (New Directions in Religion and Literature)

Synopsis

With seemingly obsessive regularity, American authors, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, evoke the sermon at culturally loaded moments in their works, deploying the form to underscore the cultural work they imagine their novels or poetry to perform. Examining this longstanding tradition of “literary preaching,” this book draws on literary applications of design theory to provide a nuanced account of American literature's complex, anxious, and persistent engagement with the Protestant sermon. Analyzing literary preaching as a transhistorical form that simultaneously attracts and repels authors, Smalley demonstrates how major US writers–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison–have subverted the sermon's predominantly religious content in order to reimagine profound moments of reform in a political, cultural, and aesthetic mode. This study elucidates new lines of literary kinship, offers fresh readings of familiar works, and establishes literary preaching as an undertheorized but significant tradition in American literature.

Copyright:

2024

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781350400078

Related ISBNs:

9781350400009

Publisher:

Bloomsbury Publishing

Date of Addition:

05/29/24

Copyrighted By:

Matthew Smalley

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Literature and Fiction, Religion and Spirituality, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.