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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature: The Cultural Work of Literary Preaching from Emerson to Morrison

Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature: The Cultural Work of Literary Preaching from Emerson to Morrison

Smalley, Matthew

Paperback

Series: New Directions in Religion and Literature

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1350400254
ISBN13: 9781350400252
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Jan 22 2026
Pages: 232
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.48 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
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.

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