There Before Us : Religion, Literature, and Culture from Emerson to Wendell Berry

by Lundin, Roger

• ISBN13: 9780802829634
• ISBN10: 0802829635
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-01-02
• Publisher: Eerdmans Pub Co

Summary

In recent American life, religion has once again asserted its place as a motivating factor. Yet the place of religion in literary studies continues to take a back seat to trendier academic causes."There Before Us" begins to remedy this deficiency by exploring the place of faith in the lives of writers who wrote after Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential 1837 call to establish a national literary culture free from "the learning of other lands." The authors in this volume explore the dimensions of this religious and national consciousness in the writings of H. D. Thoreau, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson. Frances Harper, Mark Twain, William and Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. In developing their arguments, the essayists draw upon a wide array of contemporary theoretical resources -- from African-American poetics to environmental criticism, from the hermeneutics of suspicion to the new historicism."There Before Us" includes essays by Katherine Clay Bassard, Lawrence Buell, Michael Colacurcio, John Gatta, Roger Lundin, Gail McDonald, Barbara Packer, and M. D. Walhout.

Table of Contents

Signing off : religious indifference in America	p. 1
"Rare and delectable places" : Thoreau's imagination of sacred space at Walden	p. 23
Charity and its discontents : pity and politics in Melville's fiction	p. 49
Nimble believing : Dickinson and the conflict of interpretations	p. 80
Private interpretations : the defence of slavery, nineteenth-century hermeneutics, and the poetry of Frances E. W. Harper	p. 110
Mark Twain's Lincoln as "man of the border" : religion, free thinking, and the civil war	p. 141
The liberal saint : American liberalism and the problem of character	p. 172
A homemade heaven : modernist poetry and the social gospel	p. 194
Religion and the environmental imagination in American literature	p. 216
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.