BiblioVault - Books about Spiritual life in literature

American Sage

The Spiritual Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Barry M. Andrews

University of Massachusetts Press, 2021

Even during his lifetime, Ralph Waldo Emerson was called the Sage of Concord, a fitting title for this leader of the American Transcendentalist movement. Everything that Emerson said and wrote directly addressed the conduct of life, and in his view, spiritual truth and understanding were the essence of religion. Unsurprisingly, he sought to rescue spirituality from decay, eschewing dry preaching and rote rituals.

Unitarian minister Barry M. Andrews has spent years studying Emerson, finding wisdom and guidance in his teachings and practices, and witnessing how the spiritual lives of others are enriched when they grasp the many meanings in his work. In American Sage, Andrews explores Emerson's writings, including his journals and letters, and makes them accessible to today's spiritual seekers. Written in everyday language and based on scholarship grounded in historical detail, this enlightening book considers the nineteenth-century religious and intellectual crosscurrents that shaped Emerson's worldview to reveal how his spiritual teachings remain timeless and modern, universal and uniquely American.

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Kerouac, the Word and the Way

Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester

Ben Giamo

Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Jack Kerouac, a "ragged priest of the word" according to Ben Giamo, embarked on a spiritual quest "for the ultimate meaning of existence and suffering, and the celebration of joy in the meantime." For Kerouac, the quest was a sustained and creative experiment in literary form. Intuitive and innovative, Kerouac created prose styles that reflected his search for personal meaning and spiritual intensity. These styles varied from an exuberant brand of conventional narrative (On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Desolation Angels) to spontaneous bop prosody (Visions of Cody.Doctor Sax, and The Subterraneans). Giamo’s primary purpose is to chronicle and clarify Kerouac’s various spiritual quests through close examinations of the novels. Kerouac began his quest with On the Road, which also is Giamo’s real starting point. To establish early themes, spiritual struggles, and stylistic shifts, however, Giamo begins with the first novel, Town and Country, and ends with Big Sur, the final turning point in Kerouac’s quest.

Kerouac was primarily a religious writer bent on testing and celebrating the profane depths and transcendent heights of experience and reporting both truly. Baptized and buried a Catholic, he was also heavily influenced by Buddhism, especially from 1954 until 1957 when he integrated traditional Eastern belief into several novels. Catholicism remained an essential force in his writing, but his study of Buddhism was serious and not solely in the service of his literary art. As he wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1954, "Since I saw you I took up the study of Buddhism and for me it’s the word and the way I was looking for."

Giamo also seeks IT—"a vital force in the experience of living that takes one by surprise, suspending for the moment belief in the ‘real’ concrete grey everyday of facts of self and selfhood . . . its various meanings, paths, and oscillations: from romantic lyricism to ‘the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being and from the void-pit of the Great World Snake to the joyous pain of amorous love, and, finally, from Catholic/Buddhist serenity to the onset of penitential martyrhood."

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Mind of Winter

Wallace Stevens, Meditation, and Literature

William W. Bevis

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988

Bevis addresses the most puzzling and least studied aspect of Wallace Stevens’ poetry: detachment. Stevens’ detachment, often associated by readers with asceticism, bareness, or withdrawal, is one of the distinguishing and pervasive characteristics of Stevens’ poetic work. Bevis agues that this detachment is meditative and therefore experiential in origin. Moreover, the meditative Stevens of spare syntax and clear image is in constant tension with the romantic, imaginative Stevens of dazzling metaphors and exuberant flight. Indeed, for Bevis, Stevens is a poet not of imagination and reality, but of imagination and reality, but of imagination and meditation in relation to reality.

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The Wilderness Within

American Women Writers and Spiritual Quest

Kristina K. Groover

University of Arkansas Press, 1999

America’s literature is notably marked by a preoccupation with the spiritual quest. Questing heroes from Huck Finn to Nick Adams have undertaken solitary journeys that pull them away from family and society and into a transformative wilderness that brings them to a new understanding of the spiritual world. Women, however, have not often been portrayed as questing heroes. Bound to home and community, they have been more frequently cast as representatives of that stifling world from which the hero is compelled to flee. Are women in American literary texts thus excluded from spiritual experience?

Kristina K. Groover, in examining this question, finds that books by American women writers offer alternative patterns for seeking revelation—patterns which emphasize not solitary journeys, but the sacredness of everyday life. Drawing on the work of feminist theorists and theologians, including Carol Gilligan, Naomi Goldenberg, and Rosemary Ruether, Groover explores the spiritual nature and force of domesticity, community, storytelling, and the garden in the works of such writers as Toni Morrison, Katherine Anne Porter, Kaye Gibbons, and Alice Walker. Ordinary, personal experience in these works becomes a source for spiritual revelation. Wisdom is gained, lessons are learned, and lives are healed not in spite of home and communal ties, but because of them.

Thus, American women writers, Groover argues, make alternative literary and spiritual paradigms possible. Similarly, Kristina K. Groover, in this lucid and groundbreaking work, opens up new fields of exploration for any reader interested in women’s spirituality or in the rich, diverse field of American literature.

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