Puritan Origins of American Sex

Tracy Fessenden is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Nicholas Radel is Professor of English at Furman University. MagdalenaZaborowska is Associate Professor of English at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.

"An intellectual joining of Sacvan Bercovitch's PuritanOrigins of the American Self and Michel Foucault's History of Sex...[F]amiliar and unfamiliar figures, historical and modern, are revealed in a new light..." -- Religious Studies Review"For those who imagine there is nothing more to say about the vexed relations between Puritanism and American sexuality, this richly inflected, shrewdly edited collection of essays holds many surprises. Treating the entire history of their associations, it adds a new chapter to our understanding of religion and the body in America." -- Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara"...nuanced, historically informed readings of Puritan discourses and their afterlives in later cultural texts." -- Glenn Hendler, University of Notre Dame, in the Journal of Religion

• Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; Foreword by Emory Elliott; 1. Introduction: The Puritan Origins of American Sex, Tracy Fessenden, Nicholas F. Radel, and Magdalena J. Zaborowska ; 2. Wigglesworth, Mather, Starr: Witch-hunts and General Wickedness in Public, Ed Ingebretsen ; 3. A Sodom Withing: Historicizing Puritan Homoerotics in the Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, Nicholas F. Radel ; 4. Remember Me: The Wonders of an Invisible World: Sex, Patriarcy, and Paranoia in Early America, Boris Vejdovsky ; 5. Uncleanliness is Next to Godliness: Sexuality, Salvation, and the Early American Women's Execution Narrative, Jodi Schorb ; 6. The Puritan Eye-Ball, or, Sexing the Transcendent, Rene L. Bergland ; 7. Ejaculating Tongues: Poe, Mather, and the Jewish Penis, Gustavus Stadler ; 8. Now You Shall See How a Slave was Made a Man: Gendering Frederick Douglass's Struggles with Christianity, Darryl Dickson-Carr ; 9. Enslaving Passions: White Male Sexuality and the Evasion of Race, Russ Castronovo ; 10. The other Woman's Sphere: Nuns, Prostitutes, and the Medicalization of Middle-Class Domesticity, Tracy Fessenden ; 11. Christian Maidens and Heathen Monks: Oratorical Seduction at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions, Carrie Tirado Bramen ; 12. Americanization of a Queer Fellow: Performning Jewishness and Sexuality in Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky , with a Footnote on the (Monica)Lewinsky'ed Nation, Magdalena Zaborowska ; 13. Desert of the Heart : Jane Rule's Puritan Outing, Margaret Soenser Breen ; 14. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Gardner, Robert Morace ; 15. Down Here in Paradise: Toni Morrison's Americas, Judith Wilt ; Notes on Contributors; Index