Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature

Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature
Author: Matthew Smalley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2024-05-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350400076
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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 Cambridge History of African American Literature

The Cambridge History of African American Literature
Author: Maryemma Graham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 861
Release: 2011-02-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521872170
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A major new history of the literary traditions, oral and print, of African-descended peoples in the United States.

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature
Author: Paul Downes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2015-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107085292
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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.

Preaching in Hitler's Shadow

Preaching in Hitler's Shadow
Author: Dean G. Stroud
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2013-10-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0802869025
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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
Author: Desirée Henderson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317124480
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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
Author: Everett H. Emerson
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1977
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780299072704
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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.

Strength to Love

Strength to Love
Author: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0807051977
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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 Routledge Companion to Native American Literature

The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature
Author: Deborah L. Madsen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 551
Release: 2015-10-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317693191
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The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature engages the multiple scenes of tension — historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic — that constitutes a problematic legacy in terms of community identity, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, language, and sovereignty in the study of Native American literature. This important and timely addition to the field provides context for issues that enter into Native American literary texts through allusions, references, and language use. The volume presents over forty essays by leading and emerging international scholars and analyses: regional, cultural, racial and sexual identities in Native American literature key historical moments from the earliest period of colonial contact to the present worldviews in relation to issues such as health, spirituality, animals, and physical environments traditions of cultural creation that are key to understanding the styles, allusions, and language of Native American Literature the impact of differing literary forms of Native American literature. This collection provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It supports academic study and also assists general readers who require a comprehensive yet manageable introduction to the contexts essential to approaching Native American Literature. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of this literary culture. Contributors: Joseph Bauerkemper, Susan Bernardin, Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez, Kirby Brown, David J. Carlson, Cari M. Carpenter, Eric Cheyfitz, Tova Cooper, Alicia Cox, Birgit Däwes, Janet Fiskio, Earl E. Fitz, John Gamber, Kathryn N. Gray, Sarah Henzi, Susannah Hopson, Hsinya Huang, Brian K. Hudson, Bruce E. Johansen, Judit Ágnes Kádár, Amelia V. Katanski, Susan Kollin, Chris LaLonde, A. Robert Lee, Iping Liang, Drew Lopenzina, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Deborah Madsen, Diveena Seshetta Marcus, Sabine N. Meyer, Carol Miller, David L. Moore, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Mark Rifkin, Kenneth M. Roemer, Oliver Scheiding, Lee Schweninger, Stephanie A. Sellers, Kathryn W. Shanley, Leah Sneider, David Stirrup, Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr., Tammy Wahpeconiah

African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800: Volume 1

African American Literature in Transition, 1750–1800: Volume 1
Author: Rhondda Robinson Thomas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 620
Release: 2022-04-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108858767
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This volume provides an illuminating exploration of the development of early African American literature from an African diasporic perspective—in Africa, England, and the Americas. It juxtaposes analyses of writings by familiar authors like Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano with those of lesser known or examined works by writers such as David Margrett and Isabel de Olvera to explore how issues including forced migration, enslavement, authorship, and racial identity influenced early Black literary production and how theoretical frameworks like Afrofuturism and intersectionality can enrich our understanding of texts produced in this period. Chapters grouped in four sections – Limits and Liberties of Early Black Print Culture, Black Writing and Revolution, Early African American Life in Literature, and Evolutions of Early Black Literature – examine how transitions coupled with conceptions of race, the impacts of revolution, and the effects of religion shaped the trajectory of authors' lives and the production of their literature.

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction
Author: Derrick R. Spires
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 2556
Release: 2022-04-21
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1039302270
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This product contains both The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume A: Beginnings to 1820 and The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume B: 1820 to Reconstruction as a single purchase. Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, the anthology balances representation of widely agreed-upon major works with an emphasis on American literature’s diversity, variety, breadth, and connections with the rest of the Americas. Highlights of Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction • Complete texts of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, The Coquette, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; and Benito Cereno • In-depth, Contexts sections on such topics as “Slavery and Resistance,” “Print Culture and Popular Literature,” “Expansion, Native American Expulsion, and Manifest Destiny,” and “Gender and Sexuality” • Broader and more extensive coverage of Indigenous oral and visual literature and African American oral literature than in competing anthologies • Full author sections in the anthology are devoted to authors such as Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Briton Hammon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, José Maria Heredia, Black Hawk, and many others