The Puritan Origins of American Sex

Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature

Tracy Fessenden, Nicholas F. Radel, Magdalena J. Zaborowska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136692369
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

From witch trials to pickaxe murderers, from brothels to convents, and from slavery to Toni Morrison's Paradise, these essays provide fascinating and provocative insights into our sexual and religious conventions and beliefs.

Index

Abolitionists, 154

Abortion, 283

Acculturation, 213–229

gender and, 215, 216, 218

as heterosexualization, 216–222

Adam, 75, 76, 102–103, 267

Adams, Eliphalet, 81–85

Adamson, Joseph, 268

“Adversarial aesthetics,” 281

“Aesthetic wholeness,” 267

African Americans, 8, 9. See also Blacks; Minorities

Douglass, Frederick, and, 13, 127–140

homosexuality and, 140

literature of, 273, 274

Morrison, Toni, and, 273–290

Agnes Morris, 160

Alcott, William, 150, 160–161

Allen, Robert L., 8

“Amber (Get) Waves (Your) of (Plastic) Grain (Uncle Sam)”, 266

American capitalism, 216

American culture, 2–4, 11–13

American fiction and, 266, 277

feminists and, 6–7

American exceptionalism, 12

American history, 2, 3, 4, 11, 12, 15

exclusionary notions in, 14

witchcraft and, 57, 58

American Ladies Magazine, 177

American literature, 3, 9, 214, 265

African-American, 273, 274

gay and lesbian, 5, 235–250

On Moral Fiction’s observations on, 265, 266

American Medico-Surgery Bulletin, 183

American Nazi Party, 265

American self, 2, 3, 6, 10, 12, 14

American sex, 1–5, 15. See also Puritan sex; Sex; Sexuality

Americanization, 213–229

Anderson, Sherwood, 258

Angels in America, 275

Anthony, Aaron, 132–133

Anti-Catholicism, 170, 178, 179, 182, 195

Antimasturbation, 13, 152–161, 165

Antin, Mary, 225

Antinomians, 23, 2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Emory Elliott
• Introduction: The Puritan Origins of American Sex
• Wigglesworth, Mather, Starr: Witch-Hunts and General Wickedness in Public
• A Sodom Within: Historicizing Puritan Homoerotics in the Diary of Michael Wigglesworth
• “Remember Me”: The Wonders of an Invisible World—Sex, Patriarchy, and Paranoia in Early America
• Uncleanliness Is Next to Godliness: Sexuality, Salvation, and the Early American Woman’s Execution Narrative
• The Puritan Eyeball, or, Sexing the Transcendent
• Ejaculating Tongues: Poe, Mather, and the Jewish Penis
• Now You Shall See How a Slave Was Made a Man: Gendering Frederick Douglass’s Struggles with Christianity
• Enslaving Passions: White Male Sexuality and the Evasion of Race
• The Other Woman’s Sphere: Nuns, Prostitutes, and the Medicalization of Middle-Class Domesticity
• Christian Maidens and Heathen Monks: Oratorical Seduction at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions
• Americanization of a “Queer Fellow”: Performing Jewishness and Sexuality in Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, with a Footnote on the (Monica) Lewinsky’ed Nation
• Desert of the Heart: Jane Rule’s Puritan Outing
• Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Gardner
• “Down Here in Paradise”: Toni Morrison’s Americas
• Notes on Contributors
• Index