*The Bible and American arts and letters

Plot

To what extent has the Bible influenced American arts and letters? In answer to this question, the essayists in this book examine the histories of particular American arts and artistic traditions. The contributors represent a variety of disciplines and are experts in their fields. Their essays highlight the presence or absence of biblical ideas, motifs, or conventions in specific American traditions, including poetry, the nineteenth-century novel, twentieth-century fiction, drama, architecture, music, painting, and folk arts. Giles Gunn's introduction examines the curious status of the Bible as a guidebook for American culture and Sacvan Bercovitch's concluding essay analyzes the biblical basis of the American myth. Uniting all the essays is the paradoxical theme of the Bible as a source of both inspiration and dissatisfaction. Contents: Introduction by Giles Gunn; 1. The antinomian strain : the Bible and American poetry by Herbert Schneidau; 2. "As through a glass eye, darkly" : the Bible in the nineteenth-century American novel by Edwin Cady; 3. The Bible and twentieth-century American fiction by Rowland A. Sherrill; 4 American drama and the Bible : the case of Eugene O'Neill's Lazarus laughed by William H. Shurr; 5. American architecture : the prophetic and biblical strains by Clifford E. Clark; 6. The Bible and American music by Edwin M. Good; 7. The Bible in American painting by John W. Dixon; 8. The Bible and American folk arts by Daniel W. Patterson; 9. The biblical basis of the American myth by Sacvan Bercovitch.