The study of religion in American literature has long been shaped around postsecular theory, but signs of fatigue have emerged. Tracy Fessenden concludes that the paradigm has unhelpfully sacralized literature, while Peter Coviello, Jared Hickman, and Sarah Rivett urge global space and deeper time to diversify the field. The four books reviewed here seem to have taken these suggestions to heart. None of them have much to say about the postsecular, while all extend the geographic space and historical continuities of religion in American literary history.
Jeffrey Einboden’s The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture aims for both global breadth and historical depth from its title to its promise of “a genealogy of Islamic influence that spans America’s critical century of self-definition” (xi). In the works of Ezra Stiles, William Bentley, Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Einboden argues, “Muslim sources exercised a formative impact on U.S....
