Product Description: Displays of devout religious faith are very much in evidence in nineteenth-century sentimental novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Little Women, but the precise theological nature of this piety has been little examined. In the first dedicated study of the religious contents of sentimental literature, Claudia Stokes counters the long-standing characterization of sentimental piety as blandly nondescript and demonstrates that these works were in fact groundbreaking, assertive, and highly specific in their theological recommendations and endorsements...read more

Product Description: Writing beyond Prophecy offers a new interpretation of the American Renaissance by drawing attention to a cluster of later, rarely studied works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Identifying a line of writing from Emerson's Conduct of Life to Hawthorne's posthumously published Elixir of Life manuscript to Melville's Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Martin Kevorkian demonstrates how these authors wrestled with their vocational calling...read more

Product Description: As much a doubter as a believer, Emily Dickinson often expressed views about God in general—and God with respect to suffering in particular. In many of her poems, she contemplates the question posed by countless theologians and poets before her: how can one reconcile a benevolent deity with evil in the world?            Examining Dickinson’s perspectives on the role played by a supposedly omnipotent and all-loving God in a world marked by violence and pain, Patrick Keane initially focuses on her poem “Apparently with no surprise,” in which frost, a “blonde Assassin,” beheads a “happy Flower,” a spectacle presided over by “an Approving God...read more

Product Description: Brand New.

Product Description: This study focuses on the ways in which Emerson's spiritual and philosophical concerns overlap with Zen and in the ways that Zen can help in understanding Emerson's work.

Product Description: When Henry David Thoreau died in 1862, friends and admirers remembered him as an eccentric man whose outer life was continuously fed by deeper spiritual currents. But scholars have since focused almost exclusively on Thoreau’s literary, political, and scientific contributions...read more

Draws on novels, religious pamphlets and manuals, and anti-sentimentalist writings of nineteenth-century America to show how genteel women and Protestant clergymen fostered the emergence of a consumer culture

Product Description: Offers the first systematic study of Emerson as a religious thinker and analyzes him as a case study in expressive religious individualism. By filling an important gap in Emersonian criticism, it not only throws new light on Emerson's thought but also offers a critique of the individualistic ideology he first formulated...read more

Inspects Thoreau's writings to discern the relationship between his religious beliefs and his political, ecological, and philosophical views