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Preaching to Convert offers an intriguing new perspective on the outreach strategies of U.S. evangelicals, framing them as examples of activist performance, broadly defined as acts performed before an audience in the hopes of changing hearts and minds. Most writing about activist performance has focused on left-progressive causes, events, and actors. Preaching to Convert argues against such a constricted view of activism and for a more nuanced understanding of U.S. evangelicalism as a movement defined by its desire to win converts and spread the gospel.
 
The book positions evangelicals as a diverse, complicated group confronting the loss of conservative Christianity’s default status in 21st-century U.S. culture. In the face of an increasingly secular age, evangelicals have been reassessing models of outreach. In acts like handing out Bible tracts to strangers on the street or going door-to-door with a Bible in hand, in elaborately staged horror-themed morality plays or multimillion-dollar creationist discovery centers, in megachurch services beamed to dozens of satellite campuses, and in controversial “ex-gay” ministries striving to return gays and lesbians to the straight and narrow, evangelicals are redefining what it means to be deeply committed in a pluralist world. The book’s engaging style and careful argumentation make it accessible and appealing to scholars and students across a range of fields.

ike most of his contemporaries, poet John Gould Fletcher was drawn to criticism because of the opportunity it presented to express his own deeply held philosophical beliefs. Critical journalism also offered Fletcher a chance to make his living as a man of letters.

Selected Essays of John Gould Fletcher brings together for the first time a representative selection from Fletcher’s voluminous critical writings. Ranging in subject from Modernist poetics to Asian art, these essays reveal a keen, insightful intellect coming to grips with the central artistic problems of the most revolutionary period in modern literature, painting, music, and philosophy.

First published in Poetry, North American Review, Southern Review, and Criterion, and other leading cultural journals of their day, Fletcher’s essays are arranged in three groups: poetry and poetics; appreciation of individual writers; and essays on art and philosophy.

Significant and long overdue both in terms of the light it sheds on Fletcher and the evolution of the Modernist movement, the collection should challenge all serious students of literature and general readers alike.

A Pulitzer Prize winner best known as an imagist, John Gould Fletcher experimented with every facet of Modernist poetry and influenced poets in both England and the United States. this is the first collection to span his entire career, and brings again to the public eye work that has been unavailable for thirty-five years.

Fletcher is responsible for introducing Ezra Pound to French symbolism, and Amy Lowell to “polyphonic prose,” and his connection with the Southern Fugitive Agrarian movement adds to his significance as the first modern Southern poet. The editors have chosen representative works for his many stages of development and discuss in the introduction Fletcher’s influence on the better-known modernists.

Selected Poems of John Gould Fletcher is the first n a series of books by or about Fletcher to fill an important space in home and public libraries with American literature collections.