Invisible Conversations
Religion in the Literature of America

American literature offers exceptional resources for understanding the complex role religion has played in the life of the culture and in the experience of its people. In recent decades, however, the academic study of that literature has largely treated religion, in the words of a noted scholar, as an "invisible domain." In joining the rich conversations that have enlivened American culture for centuries, Invisible Conversations seeks to bring to light the vital role that religion has played in the literature of the United States.

Introduction by Roger Lundin

Part 1 Religion and American Fiction

1. Finding a Prose for God: Religion and American Fiction

                Denis Donoghue

2. American Literature and/as Spiritual Inquiry

                Lawrence Buell

Part 2 Religion and American Poetry

3. Variety as Religious Experience: The Poetics of the Plain Style

                Elisa New

4. Keeping the Metaphors Alive: American Poetry and Transformation

                Barbara Packer

Part 3 Literature, Religion, and the African American Experience

5. Genres of Redemption: African Americans, the Bible, and Slavery from Lemuel Haynes to Frederick Douglass

                Mark A. Noll

6. Balm in Gilead: Memory, Mourning, and Healing in African American Autobiography

                Albert J. Raboteau

7. The Race for Faith: Justice, Mercy, and the Sign of the Cross in African American Literature

                Katherine Clay Bassard

8. Forms of Redemption

                John Stauffer

Part 4 Literature, Religion, and American Public Life

9. Hamlet without the Prince: The Role of Religion in Postwar Nonfiction

                Alan Wolfe

10. “The Only Permanent State”: Belief and the Culture of Incredulity

                Andrew Delbanco

Part 5 Theology and American Literature

11. How the Church Became Invisible: A Christian Reading of American Literary Tradition

                Stanley Hauerwas and Ralph C. Wood

12. “The Play of the Lord”: On the Limits of Critique

               Roger Lundin

Notes

Index

Roger Lundin (Ph.D. University of Connecticut) is Blanchard Professor of English, Wheaton College.  He is the author of numerous books, including Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age (2009), There Before Us: Religion, Literature, and Culture From Emerson to Wendell Berry (2007), From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (2005), and the award-winning Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief (2004).