... of inquiry to include secular history and culture. This secular-nonsecular distinction that plagues much of theological discourse and literary criticism is an intricate one that Connor negotiates effectively. Finally, she shows us how the religious potency of the slave narrative tradition extends beyond...

...Thomas F. Haddox Duke University Press 2002 Thomas F. The ‘‘Nous’’ of Southern Catholic Haddox Quadroons: Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Identity in Les Cenelles In 1845 a group of seventeen free Creoles of color in New Orleans published Les...

...Erin A. Smith Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination . By Freedman Linda . New York : Cambridge Univ. Press . 2011 . x, 210 pp . $90.00 . Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature . By Lee Maurice S. . New York...

...Laura Henigman Missionary Positions: Evangelicalism and Empire in American Fiction . By Tricomi Albert H. . Gainesville : Univ. Press of Florida . 2011 . xii, 263 pp. $74.95 . Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century US Literature...

...Daniel Grace Abstract This essay examines Frederick Douglass’s oratory of the 1840s, when religious appeals drove his abolitionist rhetoric. In addressing the lack of critical attention paid to his early oratory and evangelism, the essay argues that these speeches, which he delivered to audiences...

...Grant Shreve If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right . By Christopher Douglas . Ithaca, NY : Cornell Univ. Press . 2016 . viii, 367 pp. Cloth, $39.95 . The Production of American Religious Freedom . By Finbarr Curtis . New...

...Mark Scroggins Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age . By Peter O’Leary . New York : Columbia Univ. Press . 2017 . xiii, 260 pp. Cloth, $60.00 ; e-book, $59.99 . The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV...

...Harold K. Bush Northrop Frye and American Fiction . By Le Fustec Claude . Toronto, ON : Univ. of Toronto Press . 2015 . 238 pp. Cloth , $55.00 ; e-book, $55.00 . What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America . By Smith Erin...

...Jonathan Arac © 2009 by Duke University Press 2009 The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison . By Beth Eddy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. 2003. xi, 204 pp. $55.00. Book Reviews Freedom’s Empire: Race...

... 2008 General Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998 . By Tuire Valkeakari. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida. 2007. ix, 261 pp. $59.95. Brief Mention Editions Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate: A Tale of the Times. By Walt Whitman. Ed...

... that the bulk of the novel is committed to representing theological debate, religious fracture, and the turbulent process by which a dissenting state church was established in New England. Child was living in the midst of disestablishment, which naturalized religious voluntarism and gave religious groups space...

...Molly Robey U.S. women's Holy Land writings—a body of novels, travel narratives, and children's literature—uniquely illustrate Americans' complex and often conflicting imperialist and religious investments in the Near East. U.S. women writers embraced the Holy Land as an extranational domestic...

..., eager to preach yet uneasy about violating gender norms, created a narrator whose sermonic interventions move steadily from the culturally feminine to the culturally masculine—from sentimentality to a dark and angry theological vision that pushed the boundaries of acceptable religious speech. Stowe's...

...Michael Ziser Under the influence of Calvinist and radical abolitionist John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson reconsidered the value of political activism rooted in absolutist and sectarian religious beliefs. Retreating from the earlier declarations of secular and democratic individualism for which he...

...Bryce Traister Abstract Although not typically read as either a religious text or a narrative preoccupied with religious issues, Herman Melville’s novella of maritime slave revolution and recontainment demonstrates how antebellum Americans came to “believe” in slavery. Focusing on the narrative’s...

... representations of obeah, a creole religion practiced by enslaved persons in the British Caribbean, arguing that such narratives use religious experience to craft an alternative transnationalism. Works such as William Earle’s 1800 novel Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack and similar chapbooks, penny...

... economic in nature—the essay examines the failure of interest-thinking to capture the most important features of conviction or belief (religious or not). To the extent that secular civil society relies on interest-thinking to manage conflicting beliefs, secularism as we know it may be limited...

...Cynthia J. Davis This essay examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century shared with influential religious ideologies including the New Thought an assumption that a comfortable...

... of the basic tenets of American liberalism, namely that interests erode, rather than sustain, communities. The novel puts forward this critique by exploring the dangers of enthusiasm, which Stowe associates variously with alcohol, excessive religious emotion, and intellectual individualism. Despite its bleak...

... society in explicitly gendered and religious acts of claiming control over her body. While Kahf illuminates the limits of secularism, she also sees its potential, and the novel ultimately envisions the secular context as a place in which to foster the umma —the global, transnational community to which...