Product Description: Sets the context and gives provoking direcriton about the deeper significance of Black Christian writing. Whence came Black Christian literature? What is Black Christian literature? Why perpetuate Black Christian literature? What purposes are served through Black Christian literature? What makes educational materials authentically Black, and substantially address ethnic, cultural, and social values and issues facing African Americans...read more

Sacred Estrangement analyzes certain works by important American writers and thinkers in the context of the "rhetoric of conversion." Such analysis is especially valuable because it provides a reliable index of the relationship between the self and larger communities. Traditionally, "conversion" has served a socializing function, signifying that one has come into alignment with certain linguistic, behavioral, and cultural expectations. The socialization process is particularly apparent in the Christian conversion narratives of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries: by publicly testifying to a conversion experience, believers became empowered members, not only of God's elect community but also of a local population. As modern autobiography developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Christian pattern was secularized and individualized. Conversion became a model for many kinds of psychological change. With the coming of the twentieth century, however, the authors upon whom Peter Dorsey focuses, including William and Henry James, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, radically revised conversion rhetoric. If conversion had traditionally linked the search for illumination with the search for a defined social role, these writers increasingly used conversion as an index of estrangement from mainstream America. Dorsey documents this profound change in the way American intellectuals defined the "self," not in terms of personal orientation toward or away from a given community, but as a resistance to such an orientation altogether, as if social forces by their "nature" were a threat to personal identity. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Characterized by oral expression and ritual performance, the black church has been a dynamic force in African American culture. In The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination, Dolan Hubbard explores the profound influence of the sermon upon both the themes and the styles of African American literature...read more

Product Description: "Creative, original, and vigorous. . . . The selected pieces represent a breadth of works by novelists considered touchstones in African-American literature."--Emma Waters Dawson, Florida A&M University"An interesting twist in interpretation of a long-standing literary trope--an apocalypse--carried beyond a traditional Eurocentric analysis to an Afrocentric analysis grounded in black culture, including its own language, its own style, its own trickster tales, and its own legitimate folk heroes...read more

Product Description: Allegory in America surveys the history of American allegorical writing from the Puritans through the period of American romanticism to postmodernism. In a series of theoretical chapters the cultural function of allegory is discussed in relation to the mythology of American exceptionalism...read more

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, a finely written, erudite study by the late literary critic looks at the ways America's greatest writers have treated God. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

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Book by Clasby, Nancy (view table of contents)

Writting in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Andre Dubus, the author explores the relationship between faith and fiction, arguing that literature is a powerful medium for experiencing and understanding mystery. Reprint. (view table of contents)

The author examines the works of four writers who have profoundly impacted his life, including Gerard Manley Hopkin's sonnets and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and reveals how these writers, who wrote with such passion and pain, can assist us in better understanding our own inescapable grief and sadness. 20,000 first printing.

The author examines the works of four writers who have profoundly impacted his life, including Gerard Manley Hopkin's sonnets and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and reveals how these writers, who wrote with such passion and pain, can assist us in better understanding our own inescapable grief and sadness. Reprint.

Product Description: In this remarkable work, Roger Lundin seeks the source of American moral and cultural authority in the shift from nature to experience figured in the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While the pragmatic tradition concludes that experience must generate the very light that will lead us out of its own darkness, From Nature to Experience returns to religion for illumination and truth...read more

Product Description: Complex metabolic pathway diagrams are a hallmark of many biochemistry textbooks. But what do they tell us about disease, physiology, cell signaling, aging, immunity, and gene expression? In a refreshing approach to the subject of metabolism, Navigating Metabolism provides a conceptual framework for navigating these pathways, showing how cells generate energy and synthesize cellular constituents and then further relating metabolic reactions to molecular, genetic, and signaling underpinnings...read more