Religion and Sexuality in American Literature

Although sometimes religion and sexuality is treated as an aberrant theme in American literary and religious history, American writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to John Updike have been fascinated with the connection between religious and sexual experience. Through the voice of American fiction, Religion and Sexuality in American Literature examines the relations of body and spirit (religion and sexuality) by asking two basic questions: how have American novelists handled the interaction between religious and sexual experience? Are there instructive similarities and differences in how male and female authors write about religion and sexuality? Using both canonical and noncanonical fiction, Ann-Janine Morey examines novels dealing with the ministry as the medium wherein so many of the tensions of religion and sexuality are dramatized, and then moves to contemporary novels that deal with moral and religious issues through metaphor. Based on a sophisticated and selective application of metaphor theory, deconstruction, and feminist postmodernism, Morey argues that while American fiction has replicated many traditional animosities, there are also some rather surprising resources here for commonality between men and women if we acknowledge and understand the intimate relationship between language and physical life.