Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature: The Cultural Work of Literary Preaching from Emerson to Morrison (New Directions in Religion and 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. Analysing 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. 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.