Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature

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Examining the longstanding tradition of "literary preaching", this book provides a wide-ranging and provocative analysis of American literature's obsessive, contradictory, and enduring engagement with the protestant sermon. Providing a nuanced exploration of the attractive and repulsive affordances of literary preaching, this book explores why it endures in American literature. Smalley demonstrates how key US writers - from the mid-19th century to the present - have subverted the predominantly religious content of the sermon in order to reimagine profound moments in US history in a political, cultural, aesthetic, and predominantly secular mode. Analysing 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, this book provides new insights into the cultural politics of these authors' anxious engagements with the sermon.