The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature

by Fessenden,Tracy

• ISBN13: 9780415926393
• ISBN10: 0415926394
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-12-05
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Covering all new ground in the scholarship of religion and sexuality, the contributors address the Puritan and Protestant roots of American sexual identity and culture. Offering both historical and interdisciplinary breadth, the volume charts the influence of Protestantism on the shaping of the American character from Cotton Mather to Kenneth Starr. From witch trials to pickaxe murderers, from brothels to convents, and from slavery to Toni Morrison'sParadise,these essays provide fascinating and provocative insights into our sexual and religious conventions and beliefs.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Foreword	ix
Emory Elliott
Introduction: The Puritan Origins of American Sex	1	(20)
Tracy Fessenden
Nicholas F. Radel
Magdalena J. Zaborowska
Wigglesworth, Mather, Starr: Witch-Hunts and General Wickedness in Public	21	(20)
Ed Ingebretsen
A Sodom Within: Historicizing Puritan Homoerotics in the Diary of Michael Wigglesworth	41	(15)
Nicholas F. Radel
``Remember Me'': The Wonders of an Invisible World---Sex, Patriarchy, and Paranoia in Early America	56	(16)
Boris Vejdovsky
Uncleanliness Is Next to Godliness: Sexuality, Salvation, and the Early American Woman's Execution Narrative	72	(21)
Jodi Schorb
The Puritan Eyeball, or, Sexing the Transcendent	93	(16)
Renee L. Bergland
Ejaculating Tongues: Poe, Mather, and the Jewish Penis	109	(18)
Gustavus Stadler
Now You Shall See How a Slave Was Made a Man: Gendering Frederick Douglass's Struggles with Christianity	127	(18)
Darryl Dickson-Carr
Enslaving Passions: White Male Sexuality and the Evasion of Race	145	(24)
Russ Castronovo
The Other Woman's Sphere: Nuns, Prostitutes, and the Medicalization of Middle-Class Domesticity	169	(22)
Tracy Fessenden
Christian Maidens and Heathen Monks: Oratorical Seduction at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions	191	(22)
Carrie Tirado Bramen
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	213	(22)
Magdalena J. Zaborowska
Desert of the Heart: Jane Rule's Puritan Outing	235	(18)
Margaret Soenser Breen
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Gardner	253	(20)
Robert A. Morace
``Down Here in Paradise'': Toni Morrison's Americas	273	(20)
Judith Wilt
Notes on Contributors	293	(4)
Index	297