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