Description
investigates the ways in which the literature of the American Renaissance negotiates the ethical, theological, political, and aesthetic implications of the Bible’s entanglement in the mid-nineteenth-century debates over slavery. In chapters on both nonfiction (sermons, ethnographies, and political speeches) and fiction (Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an America Slave, and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, among others), Scripturally Enslaved explores the ways in which antebellum writers represent and respond to the use of biblical materials in the politics of race. By examining the intersections of the discourses of religion and race, the book complicates the study of both religious experience and cultural engagement in the texts of the American Renaissance and extends the argument for the centrality of the slavery experience in all American texts of the period.