Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature - (New Directions in Religion and Literature) by Matthew Smalley (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature examines a vital dimension of US literary and religious culture that has long remained underexplored and, when explored, done poorly. It engages with the subject in critically viable and creative ways
Cooper Harriss, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University, USA

About the Author

Matthew Smalley is Associate Professor of English at Fort Hays State University, USA.