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: Nineteenth-century American women’s culture was immersed in religious experience and female authors of the era employed representations of faith to various cultural ends. Focusing primarily on non-canonical texts, this collection explores the diversity of religious discourse in nineteenth-century women’s literature...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: “If ever this dreadful incubus of a book [Clarel] (I call it so because it has undermined all our happiness) gets off Herman’s shoulders I do hope he may be in better mental health―but at present I have reason to feel the gravest concern & anxiety about it―to put it in mild phrase...read more

Product Description: First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Much has been written about Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman as prominent writers, but much less research has been done regarding their spirituality, which made the writing of their classics unique. This is an award-winning study focusing on the mysticism in the lives and major works of Thoreau and Whitman, two great American literary mystics of the 19th century...read more

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. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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 (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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 (view table of contents)

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