Sentimental Confessions

Sentimental Confessions is a groundbreaking study of evangelicalism, sentimentalism, and nationalism in early African American holy women’s autobiography. At its core are analyses of the life writings of six women--Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Nancy Prince, Mattie J. Jackson, and Julia Foote--all of which appeared in the mid-nineteenth century. Joycelyn Moody shows how these authors appropriated white-sanctioned literary conventions to assert their voices and to protest the racism, patriarchy, and other forces that created and sustained their poverty and enslavement. In doing so, Moody also reveals the wealth of insights that could be gained from these kinds of writings if we were to acknowledge the spiritual convictions of their authors--if we read them because (not although) they are holy texts. The deeply held, passionately expressed beliefs of these women, says Moody, should not be brushed aside by scholars who may be tempted to view them as naïve or as indicative only of the racial, class, and gender oppressions these women suffered. In addition, Moody promotes new ways of looking at dictated narratives without relegating them to a status below self-authored texts. Helping to recover a neglected chapter of American literary history, Sentimental Confessions is filled with insights into the state of the nation in the nineteenth century.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. In college, Kevin Kopelson passed off a paper by his older brother Robert as his own. In graduate school, he plagiarized nearly an entire article from a respected scholar, and then later, having met her and been asked if he would send something for her to read, sent that essay he had plagiarized from her work. This is not to mention the many instances in which he quoted others extensively, not passing their work off as his own, but substituting it for his own words when his words were what were called for. Until recently, such plagiarisms and thefts had been his most shameful secret, shared only with a trusted few. But then Kopelson—now an English professor and the author of a number of respected books, most recently 2007's Sedaris—wrote an essay entitled "My Cortez," which was published in the London Review of Books in 2008. It was a satirical literary confession, an exploration of Kopelson's personal and professional life via his various acts of plagiarism. From that jumping off point and exploring also his other vices, CONFESSIONS OF A PLAGIARIST is the compelling and clever retelling (not to mention renovation) of Kopelson's life, one transgression at a time.

These narratives by four famous black woman preachers and evangelists, published between 1835 and 1907, all share a theme that continues to dominate Afro-American literature even today: the power of Christianity to give strength and comfort in the struggle for liberation from caste and gender restrictions.

Confessions of Love is a sentimental poetic collection steeped in one of our most complex and universally intriguing emotions, love.

Focusing on a range of important antislavery figures, including David Walker, Nat Turner, Maria Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism illustrates how antislavery discourse worked to redefine violence and vengeance as the ultimate expression (rather than denial) of love and sympathy.

CONFESSIONS OF A SERIAL SONGWRITER

This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

This study of the Confessions engages with contemporary philosophers and psychologists antagonistic to religion and demonstrates the enduring value of Augustine's journey for those struggling with theistic incredulity and religious narcissism. Paul Rigby draws on current Augustinian scholarship and the works of Paul Ricœur to cross-examine Augustine's testimony. This analysis reveals the sophistication of Augustine's confessional text, which anticipates the analytical mindset of his critics. Augustine presents a coherent, defensible response to three age-old problems: free will and grace; goodness, innocent suffering, and radical evil; and freedom and predestination. The Theology of Augustine's Confessions moves beyond commentary and allows present-day readers to understand the Confessions as its original readers experienced it, bridging the divide introduced by Kant, Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their descendants.

Chronicling the lives of African American women in the urban north of America (particularly Philadelphia) during the early years of the republic, 'A Fragile Freedom' investigates how they journeyed from enslavement to the precarious state of 'free persons' in the decades before the Civil War.