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.

The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion

The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion PDF Author: Rachel M. McCleary
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199781281
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This is a one-of-kind volume bringing together leading scholars in the economics of religion for the first time. The treatment of topics is interdisciplinary, comparative, as well as global in nature. Scholars apply the economics of religion approach to contemporary issues such as immigrants in the United States and ask historical questions such as why did Judaism as a religion promote investment in education? The economics of religion applies economic concepts (for example, supply and demand) and models of the market to the study of religion. Advocates of the economics of religion approach look at ways in which the religion market influences individual choices as well as institutional development. For example, economists would argue that when a large denomination declines, the religion is not supplying the right kind of religious good that appeals to the faithful. Like firms, religions compete and supply goods. The economics of religion approach using rational choice theory, assumes that all human beings, regardless of their cultural context, their socio-economic situation, act rationally to further his/her ends. The wide-ranging topics show the depth and breadth of the approach to the study of religion.

Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse

Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse PDF Author: Samantha Zacher
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441121102
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The Bible played a crucial role in shaping Anglo-Saxon national and cultural identity. However, access to Biblical texts was necessarily limited to very few individuals in Medieval England. In this book, Samantha Zacher explores how the very earliest English Biblical poetry creatively adapted, commented on and spread Biblical narratives and traditions to the wider population. Systematically surveying the manuscripts of surviving poems, the book shows how these vernacular poets commemorated the Hebrews as God's 'chosen people' and claimed the inheritance of that status for Anglo-Saxon England. Drawing on contemporary translation theory, the book undertakes close readings of the poems Exodus, Daniel and Judith in order to examine their methods of adaptation for their particular theologico-political circumstances and the way they portray and problematize Judaeo-Christian religious identities.

Themes in Religion and American Culture

Themes in Religion and American Culture PDF Author: Philip Goff
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807855591
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Designed to serve as an introduction to American religion, this volume is distinctive in its approach: instead of following a traditional narrative, the book is arranged thematically. Eleven chapters by top scholars present, in carefully organized and acc

Religion and American Literature Since 1950

Religion and American Literature Since 1950 PDF Author: Mark Eaton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 1350123757
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
From Flannery O'Connor and James Baldwin to the post-9/11 writings of Don DeLillo, imaginative writers have often been the most insightful chroniclers of the USA's changing religious life since the end of World War II. Exploring a wide range of writers from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and secular faiths, this book is an in-depth study of contemporary fiction's engagement with religious belief, identity and practice. Through readings of major writers of our time like Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow, Philip Roth, Marilynne Robinson and John Updike, Mark Eaton discovers a more nuanced picture of the varieties of American religious experience: that they are more commonplace than cultural ideas of progressive secularisation or faith-based polarization might suggest.

American Literature and the New Puritan Studies

American Literature and the New Puritan Studies PDF Author: Bryce Traister
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108509010
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography.

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.

The New Holy Wars

The New Holy Wars PDF Author: Robert H. Nelson
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271035826
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
The present debate raging over global warming exemplifies the clash of two public theologies. On one side, environmentalists warn of certain catastrophe if we do not take steps now to reduce the release of greenhouse gases; on the other side, economists are concerned with whether the benefits of actions to prevent higher temperatures will be worth the high costs. Robert Nelson interprets such contemporary struggles as battles between the competing secularized religions of economics and environmentalism. The outcome will have momentous consequences for us all. This book probes beneath the surface of the two movements' rhetoric to uncover their fundamental theological commitments and visions. Book jacket.

Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination

Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination PDF Author: Gregory Erickson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350212776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Organized by heretical movements and texts from the Gnostic Gospels to The Book of Mormon, this book uses the work of James Joyce – particularly Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake – as a prism to explore how the history of Christian heresy remains part of how we read, write, and think about books today. Erickson argues that the study of classical, medieval, and modern debates over heresy and orthodoxy provide new ways of understanding modernist literature and literary theory. Using Joyce's works as a springboard to explore different perspectives and intersections of 20th century literature and the modern literary and religious imagination, this book gives us new insights into how our modern and “secular” reading practices unintentionally reflect how we understand our religious histories.

Theologies of Pain

Theologies of Pain PDF Author: Lucas Hardy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350400386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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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.

The Economy of Religion in American Literature

The Economy of Religion in American Literature PDF Author: Andrew Ball
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350233994
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Examining how economic change influences religion, and the way literature mediates that influence, this book provides a thorough reassessment of modern American culture. Focusing on the period 1840-1940, the author shows how the development of capitalism reshaped American Protestantism and addresses the necessary role of literature in that process. Arguing that the “spirit of capitalism” was not fostered by traditional Puritanism, Ball explores the ways that Christianity was transformed by the market and industrial revolutions. This book refutes the long-held secularization thesis by showing that modernity was a time when new forms of the sacred proliferated, and that this religious flourishing was essential to the production of American culture. Ball draws from the work of Émile Durkheim and cultural sociology to interpret modern social upheavals like religious awakenings, revivalism, and the labor movement. Examining work from writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, Jack London, and Countee Cullen, he shows how concepts of salvation fundamentally intersect with matters of race, gender, and class, and proposes a theory that explains the enchantment of modern American society.