Author: Matthew Smalley Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 135040005X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 229
Book 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 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 writersRalph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrisonhave 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.
Author: John D. Kerkering Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108841899 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 405
Book Description
This volume addresses the political contexts in which nineteenth-century American literature was conceived, consumed, and criticized. It shows how a variety of literary genres and forms, such as poetry, drama, fiction, oratory, and nonfiction, engaged with political questions and participated in political debate.
Author: William Huntting Howell Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108617042 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 672
Book Description
This volume presents a complex portrait of the United States of America grappling with the trials of national adolescence. Topics include (but are not limited to): the dynamics of language and power, the treachery of memory, the lived experience of racial and economic inequality, the aesthetics of Indigeneity, the radical possibilities of disability, the fluidity of gender and sexuality, the depth and culture-making power of literary genre, the history of poetics, the cult of performance, and the hidden costs of foodways. Taken together, the essays offer a vision of a vibrant, contradictory, and conflicted early US Republic resistant to consensus accountings and poised to inform new and better origin stories for the polity to come.
Author: Anja-Maria Bassimir Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443878502 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 210
Book Description
This volume explores the interrelationship of religion and print practices, and sheds new light on the history of religious publishing in a globalizing world and its changing media consumption. Periodicals have recently become of interest to scholars in book history and religious studies, as they try to determine how magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers meet the diverse spiritual demands of believers conditioned by an increasingly translocal and pluralistic religious landscape in modern America and beyond. Existing publications in this field have produced new insights into the multilayered nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishing enterprises, as well as the numerous actors behind them, often crossing ethnic, gender, and national boundaries. This volume focuses instead on the socio-economic conditions, institutional organizations, action networks, and communicative environments that shape religious publishing and its medial apparatus in transnational contexts. In doing so, the authors study the material devices, business structures, and cultural networks needed for circulating words and images that nourish specific formations of religious adherence.
Author: Mark A. Noll Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197623468 Category : Bible Languages : en Pages : 865
Book Description
"This book shows how the Bible decisively shaped American national history even as that history decisively influenced the use of Scripture. It explores the rise of a strongly Protestant Bible civilization in the early United States that was then fractured by debates over slavery, contested by growing numbers of non-Protestant Americans (Catholics, Jews, agnostics), and torn apart by the Civil War. Scripture survived as a significant, though fragmented, force in the more religiously plural period from Reconstruction to the early twentieth century. Throughout, the book pays special attention to how the same Bible shone as hope for black Americans while supporting other Americans who justified white supremacy"--
Author: Thomas Koenigs Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691188947 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
"This monograph presents a new history of early American literature that traces the diverse forms of fiction circulating in the early United States (1789-1861) and how they shaped the way Americans thought and argued about political and cultural issues of their age"--
Author: Christopher N. Phillips Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108372813 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
The American Renaissance has been a foundational concept in American literary history for nearly a century. The phrase connotes a period, as well as an event, an iconic turning point in the growth of a national literature and a canon of texts that would shape American fiction, poetry, and oratory for generations. F. O. Matthiessen coined the term in 1941 to describe the years 1850–1855, which saw the publications of major writings by Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. This Companion takes up the concept of the American Renaissance and explores its origins, meaning, and longevity. Essays by distinguished scholars move chronologically from the formative reading of American Renaissance authors to the careers of major figures ignored by Matthiessen, including Stowe, Douglass, Harper, and Longfellow. The volume uses the best of current literary studies, from digital humanities to psychoanalytic theory, to illuminate an era that reaches far beyond the Civil War and continues to shape our understanding of American literature.
Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393288218 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 664
Book Description
“Elizabeth Ammons has produced a first-rate Norton Critical Edition with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” —Mason I. Lowance, Jr., University of Massachusetts Amherst “I will definitely use this edition again. The critical materials at the end of the book helped my students to have informed, productive class discussions.” —Heidi Oberholtzer Lee, University of Notre Dame This Norton Critical Edition includes: The 1852 first book edition, accompanied by Elizabeth Ammons’s preface, note on the text, and explanatory annotations. Twenty-two illustrations. A rich selection of historical documents on slavery and abolitionism. Seventeen critical reviews spanning more than 160 years. A Chronology, A Brief Time Line of Slavery in America, and an updated Selected Bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.