Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature: The Cultural Work of Literary Preaching from Emerson to Morrison

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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 literatures 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 writersRalph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrisonhave subverted the sermons 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.

Reviews

Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature examines a vital dimension of US literary and religious culture that has long remained underexplored and, when explored, done poorly. It engages with the subject in critically viable and creative ways * Cooper Harriss, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University, USA *

Author Bio

Matthew Smalley is Associate Professor of English at Fort Hays State University, USA.