American Sermons- The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr.
Michael Warner, editor
The sermon is the first and most enduring genre of our literature. The 58 sermons collected in this volume display the form's eloquence, intellectual rigor, and spiritual fervor. Ranging from the first New England settlement to mass-media evangelism and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Public and private, radical and conservative learned and vernacular, famous and neglected, these texts reclaim a neglected form of American literary art.
The sermons of the Puritan tradition are extraordinary in their richness of imagery, force of argument, and probing psychological insights. From John Winthrop's visionary injunction that "wee must consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, " to Samuel Danforth's admonition not to deviate from the divine "errand into the wilderness," the early sermons first explored what it means to be an American.
Jonathan Edwards' remarkable "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which stirred its 18th-century audiences to frenzy, shows the intensity to which the sermon could rise, while Jonathan Mayhew's "Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission" heralds the political thinking that led to the American Revolution.
The ferment of the 19th century--the Mexican War, the struggle against slavery, the Civil War--inevitably affected the sermon. Orthodoxies were challenged, and a new diversity emerged in the Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing, the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the new Church of Latter Day Saints, and the gathering strength of the African-American sermon tradition.
The 20th-century sermons collected here continue to wrestle with fundamental spiritual and civic concerns. They range from a homily on charity by the popular evangelist Billy Sunday to a discourse on interfaith cooperation by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and from Harry Emerson Fosdick's controversial "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" to John Gresham Machen's uncompromising riposte. The achievement of the African-American sermon attains a new breadth of influence in the inspiring oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr.
This volume collects the texts of 58 sermons preached between 1621 and 1968 and presents them in the approximate chronological order of their delivery. The preferred choice of texts for this volume is the first book or pamphlet publication during the lifetime of the preacher; when such a text is not known to be extant, the best available posthumously published text is used.
This volume is edited by Michael Warner, professor of English at Rutgers University and author of The Letters of the Republic: Publication and Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century America.
ISBN: 1-883011-65-5 Price: $35.00
Before Poe, and Hawthorne, and Stephen King, there was Charles Brockden Brown. Published literature: madness and murder, suicide and religious obsession, the seduction of innocence and the dangers of wilderness and settlement alike. Written in a nervous and effusive style in which rational discourse and hysterical rant contend for control, often narrated by characters on the brink of in the final years of the 18th century, Brown's startlingly prophetic novels are a virtual résumé of themes that would recur in American emotional breakdown, these works open onto dark recesses and turbulent conflict in the recently founded American nation.
In Three Gothic Novels, The Library of America collects the most significant of Brown's works: Wieland, or The Transformation (1798), his novel of a religious fanatic preyed upon by a sinister ventriloquist, often considered his masterpiece; Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799), with its indelible scenes of Philadelphia devastated by a yellow fever epidemic; and Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), which fuses traditional Gothic themes with motifs drawn from the American wilderness.
Charles Brockden Brown: Three Gothic Novels contains a newly researched chronology of Brown's life, explanatory notes, and an essay on the texts.
Sydney J. Krause is professor emeritus of English at Kent State University and general editor of the Kent State University Press Bicentennial Edition of the multi-volume Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown.
ISBN: 1-883011-57-4 Price: $35.00
This volume contains three novels of Charles Brockden Brown that were first published from 1798 to 1800: Wieland: or the Transformation, An American Tale; Arthur Mervyn: or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, First and Second Parts ; and Edgar Huntly: or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker.
December 24, 1999