Popular American Literature of the 19th Century

Description
This unique collection captures some of the excitement and diversity of the immensely prolific print culture that formed and framed nineteenth-century American life and thought. Gathering popular stories that tap into a variety of nineteenth-century American self-perceptions, fears, dreams, and longings, this resurrectionist work makes available material that is not readily available today but which was vital to the culture and daily conversations of the period.

Popular American Literature of the 19th Century collects examples of a wide range of literature including tracts, plays, poems, gift books, dime novels, school books, and serialized newspaper novels. Featuring twenty-five works in their entirety and several more in extensive excerpts, it includes works by the American Tract Society, Catharine Esther Beecher, Bret Harte, Ik Marvel, William Holmes McGuffey, Maria Monk, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mason Locke Weems, and many others. The selections cover many important themes including singleness and marriage, domesticity and gender roles, masculinity, proper conduct, social reform, temperance, religion, urban and rural life, race, slavery, class, science, business, and more. Ideal for courses in nineteenth-century American literature, surveys of American literature, and introductory courses in American studies, Popular American Literature of the 19th Century is also a rich resource for anyone interested in American popular culture.

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Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present

Description
Since colonial times, the sense of encountering an unseen, transcendental Presence within the natural world has been a characteristic motif in American literature and culture. American writers have repeatedly perceived in nature something beyond itself-and beyond themselves. In this book, John Gatta argues that the religious import of American environmental literature has yet to be fully recognized or understood. Whatever their theology, American writers have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source, in Rachel Carson's words, of "something that takes us out of ourselves."
Making Nature Sacred explores how the quest for "natural revelation" has been pursued through successive phases of American literary and intellectual history. And it shows how the imaginative challenge of "reading" landscapes has been influenced by biblical hermeneutics. Though focused on adaptations of Judeo-Christian religious traditions, it also samples Native American, African American, and Buddhist forms of ecospirituality. It begins with Colonial New England writers such Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards, re-examines pivotal figures such as Henry Thoreau and John Muir, and takes account of writings by Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, and many others along the way. The book concludes with an assessment of the "spiritual renaissance" underway in current environmental writing, as represented by five noteworthy poets and by authors such as Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson, Peter Matthiessen, and Barry Lopez.
This engaging study should appeal not only to students of literature, but also to those interested in ethics and environmental studies, religious studies, and American cultural history.

Review

"This is a subtle, learned, and complex book that makes important contributions to ecocriticism and to the ongoing discussion of the persistence of responses to the natural world that it makes sense to characterize as religious." --Christianity and Literature
"Gatta offers spiritual and imaginative hope for an age set on despair."--CHOICE
"Required reading for anyone interested not only in ecocriticism but also in an interdisciplinary approach to Christian nature spirituality."--Laurie J. Braaten, Professor of Biblical Studies, Judson College
"Gatta's ambitious work lushly draws the reader into Nature as the setting out of which the United States of America emerged.... [W]e commend Gatta's accomplishment." --Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724 (The John Harvard Library)

Review
Until the publication of Puritans among the Indians, there was no edition of captivity narratives that so successfully brought together the twin themes of literature and ethnohistory...It is a joy to read a book so well made, intelligently edited, and carefully annotated...a model collection. (Western Historical Quarterly )

An exceptionally readable introduction to literature which is not only a significant source for colonial history and ethnography but also a revealing illustration of the Purtain but also a revealing illustration of the Puritan religious vision. (Church History )

This book is an excellent introduction to the genre of the Puritan captivity narrative. It includes several of the most well-known narratives (including Mary Rowlandson), each with a brief introduction. In addition, the editors have provided an introduction to the genre in general that is well-written and informative. The bibliography is extensive and invaluable.

The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature

Description
Covering all new ground in the scholarship of religion and sexuality, the contributors address the Puritan and Protestant roots of American sexual identity and culture. Offering both historical and interdisciplinary breadth, the volume charts the influence of Protestantism on the shaping of the American character from Cotton Mather to Kenneth Starr. From witch trials to pickaxe murderers, from brothels to convents, and from slavery to Toni Morrison's Paradise, these essays provide fascinating and provocative insights into our sexual and religious conventions and beliefs.

Review
An intellectual joining of Sacvan Bercovitch's Puritan Origins of the American Self and Michel Foucault's History of Sex....[F]amiliar and unfamiliar figures, historical and modern, are revealed in a new light.....
–Religious Studies Review, January 2002

For those who imagine there is nothing more to say about the vexed relations between Puritanism and American sexuality, this richly inflected, shrewdly edited collection of essays holds many surprises. Treating the entire history of their associations, it adds a new chapter to our understanding of religion and the body in America.
–Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara

...nuanced, historically informed readings of Puritan discourses and their afterlives in later cultural texts.
–Glenn Hendler, University of Notre Dame, in the Journal of Religion