TY  - BOOK
AU  - Smalley, Matthew
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024//
TI  - Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature: The Cultural Work of Literary Preaching from Emerson to Morrison
T3  - New Directions in Religion and Literature
ET  - 1st ed
PB  - Bloomsbury Academic
CY  - London
KW  - American literature
KW  - Preaching in literature
KW  - Religion in literature
KW  - Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers
KW  - Literature & literary studies
KW  - Religion & politics
AB  - 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
SN  - 9781350400269
UR  - https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350400269?locatt=label:secondary_bloomsburyCollections
UR  - https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350400269
DO  - 10.5040/9781350400269?locatt=label:secondary_bloomsburyCollections
DO  - 10.5040/9781350400269
LA  - English
N1  - Matthew Smalley
ID  - 188575132X
ER  -