Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature

Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature PDF Author: Matthew Smalley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350400076
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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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 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.

Chaucer and the Invention of Biblical Narrative

Chaucer and the Invention of Biblical Narrative PDF Author: Chad Schrock
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350417424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Demonstrating how Chaucer uses the Bible in The Canterbury Tales as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production, this book explores the ways in which the Bible was a key tool for Chaucer's self-definition and innovation as an author. Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer's Tales in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority, textuality, interpretation, translation, rephrasing and marginalia. When the Canterbury Tales are summed up in this way, they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry – its fictional tale-tellers and characters, its quotations, allusions and images, its plots, its imaginative engagement with an audience of listeners and readers, and its hidden intentions. Schrock demonstrates that the Bible is a uniquely potent literary source for Chaucer because it combines infinite authority and plenitude with unprecedented freedom of interpretive invention. As a world-making text, the Bible's authority includes the literary as subcategory but surpasses and contextualizes it, which gives Chaucer's deferential biblical invention a different kind of freedom and safety. Within Chaucer's tales, a biblical image is often where a given narrative peaks and its plot comes clear, but a biblical world also and without strain contains his biblical fictioneers and whatever they make from the Bible, whether orthodoxy or heresy, whether sin or worship.

Theologies of Pain

Theologies of Pain PDF Author: Lucas Hardy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350400378
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
With the arrival of Puritan settlers in New England in the middle decades of the 17th-century, accounts of sickness, colonial violence, and painful religious transformation quickly emerged, enabling new forms of testimonial writing in prose and poetry. Investigating a broad transatlantic archive of religious literature, historical medical science, and philosophies of sensation, this book explores how Puritan America contemplated pain and ascribed meaning to it in writing. By weaving the experience of pained bodies into popular public discourse, Hardy shows how Puritans imagined the pained Christian body, whilst simultaneously marginalizing and vilifying those who expressed suffering by different measures, including Indigenous Americans and unorthodox colonists. Focusing on pain as it emerged from spaces of inchoate settlement and colonial violence, he provides new understandings of early American nationalism and connected racial tropes which persist today.

Preaching in Hitler's Shadow

Preaching in Hitler's Shadow PDF Author: Dean G. Stroud
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802869025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
What did German preachers opposed to Hitler say in their Sunday sermons? When the truth of Christ could cost a pastor his life, what words encouraged and challenged him and his congregation? This book answers those questions. Preaching in Hitler's Shadow begins with a fascinating look at Christian life inside the Third Reich, giving readers a real sense of the danger that pastors faced every time they went into the pulpit. Dean Stroud pays special attention to the role that language played in the battle over the German soul, pointing out the use of Christian language in opposition to Nazi rhetoric. The second part of the book presents thirteen well-translated sermons by various select preachers, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and others not as well known but no less courageous. A running commentary offers cultural and historical insights, and each sermon is preceded by a short biography of the preacher.

Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870

Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870 PDF Author: Desirée Henderson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317124480
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Focusing on the role of genre in the formation of dominant conceptions of death and dying, Desirée Henderson examines literary texts and social spaces devoted to death and mourning in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Henderson shows how William Hill Brown, Susanna Rowson, and Hannah Webster borrowed from and challenged funeral sermon conventions in their novelistic portrayals of the deaths of fallen women; contrasts the eulogies for George Washington with William Apess's "Eulogy for King Philip" to expose conflicts between national ideology and indigenous history; examines Frederick Douglass's use of the slave cemetery to represent the costs of slavery for African American families; suggests that the ideas about democracy materialized in Civil War cemeteries and monuments influenced Walt Whitman's war elegies; and offers new contexts for analyzing Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar and Emily Dickinson's poetry as works that explore the consequences of female writers claiming authority over the mourning process. Informed by extensive archival research, Henderson's study eloquently speaks to the ways in which authors adopted, revised, or rejected the conventions of memorial literature, choices that disclose their location within decisive debates about appropriate gender roles and sexual practices, national identity and citizenship, the consequences of slavery, the nature of democratic representation, and structures of authorship and literary authority.

American Literature, 1764-1789

American Literature, 1764-1789 PDF Author: Everett H. Emerson
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299072704
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The twenty-five years in which the American colonists acquired a sense of nationhood were turbulent, highly spirited, and highly literary. The finest written products of this intellectual surge included not only the fiery pamphlets, broadsides, and newspaper articles of the revolutionists, but also works of prose an poetry, letters, diaries, sermons, and plays.

Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature

Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature PDF Author: Matthew Smalley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350400252
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Examining how key US writers - from the mid-nineteenth century to the present - have subverted the predominantly religious content of the sermon, this book analyses the complex literary preaching that appears in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison. The author demonstrates how these writers use the sermon to reimagine profound moments of reform in a political, cultural, aesthetic, and predominantly secular mode"--

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature PDF Author: Paul Downes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107085292
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Hobbes, Sovereignty and Early American Literature explores the development of ideas about sovereignty and democracy in the early United States. It looks at Puritan sermons and poetry, founding-era political debates and representations of revolutionary and anti-slavery violence to reveal how Americans imagined the elusive possibility of a democratic sovereignty.

Strength to Love

Strength to Love PDF Author: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 080705190X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
The classic collection of Dr. King’s sermons that fuse his Christian teachings with his radical ideas of love and nonviolence as a means to combat hate and oppression. As Martin Luther King, Jr., prepared for the Birmingham campaign in early 1963, he drafted the final sermons for Strength to Love, a volume of his most well known homilies. King had begun working on the sermons during a fortnight in jail in July 1962. While behind bars, he spent uninterrupted time preparing the drafts for works such as “Loving Your Enemies” and “Shattered Dreams,” and he continued to edit the volume after his release. Strength to Love includes these classic sermons selected by Dr. King. Collectively they present King’s fusion of Christian teachings and social consciousness and promote his prescient vision of love as a social and political force for change.

The Cambridge History of African American Literature

The Cambridge History of African American Literature PDF Author: Maryemma Graham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521872170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 861

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Book Description
A major new history of the literary traditions, oral and print, of African-descended peoples in the United States.

A Dictionary of Books Relating to America

A Dictionary of Books Relating to America PDF Author: Joseph Sabin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description