Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Above the American Renaissance: Tracking and Theorizing the Spiritual Turn in American Literary Studies
Part I. Reconstructing the Spiritual and the Secular
Chapter 1. Haunted America: Reading the Spiritual Turn
Chapter 2. “The Spirit of Instructive Investigation”: Bronson Alcott, Transcendental Childhood, and the Search for Divinity
Chapter 3. Secular Melancholy: Religious Skepticism and the “Literature of Misery”
Chapter 4. Whittier and the Mormons: From Folk Magic to Freedom and Back Again
Chapter 5. “Will He Perish?”: Moby-Dick and Nineteenth-Century Extinction Discourse
Part II. Reconstructing the Scriptures
Chapter 6. Higher Reading: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Biblical Higher Criticism
Chapter 7. The “Art of Attaining Truth” in Moby-Dick: Print Technologies, Hermeneutics, and Castaway Readers
Chapter 8. “New-born Bard[s] of the Holy Ghost”: The American Bibles of Walt Whitman and Joseph Smith
Chapter 9. The Other Traditions of Palestine: An 1863 Novel by Ebenezer Wheelwright
Chapter 10. The Millennial Impulse above the American Renaissance: From Jonathan Edwards to Charles Grandison Finney and the Second Great Awakening
Part III. Reconstructing Popular Religion
Chapter 11. Hymns by the Fireside: Religious Verse and the Rise and the Fall of the Fireside Poets
Chapter 12. Keeping the Sabbath at Home: Emily Dickinson and the Rise of Private Hymnody
Chapter 13. “The Nearest Dream Recedes – Unrealized”: Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Fascicle 14
Chapter 14. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martyrdom: Protestant Missions in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Protestant Missions
Chapter 15. “God Will Give Him Blood to Drink”: Unholy Dying in The House of the Seven Gables
Afterword: God Above, America Beneath: Abraham Lincoln and Religion
Contributors
Index
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