Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature

The Cultural Work of Literary Preaching from Emerson to Morrison

Matthew Smalley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781350400009
• eBook ISBN: 9781350400078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The Cultural Work of Literary Preaching: Form, Affordance, and Resistance
• 1 “There Will Soon Be No More Priests”: Surrogate Preachers in Emerson and Whitman
• 2 “But I Say Unto You”: The Literary Pulpit Exchange in Nathaniel Hawthorne and Rebecca Harding Davis
• 3 Reprising God’s Trombones: The Novel Sermons of William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston
• 4 Toni Morrison, the Anxieties of Literary Preaching, and the Circulated Sermon
• Coda“That’s the Pulpit Speaking”
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright Page