Book

The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature

Tracy Fessenden, Nicholas F. Radel, and Magdalena J. Zaborowska (editors) · 2001

An edited collection of scholarly essays examining the intersections of Puritanism, sexuality, religion, and national identity in American literature from the colonial period through the twentieth century. The work employs interdisciplinary American Studies approaches to analyze how Puritan religious ideology shaped representations of sex, gender, and national character in American literary texts.

Sequence ladder

Narrative Intelligence sources live outside the figurative image sequence ladder. Adaptive placement applies to image sequences, not this reading library.

Themeresearch-bulk-chunkpoas

Context2001research_analysis

Appears in

Sex & Religion

What this book knows

Puritan sexual regulation persists as the hidden grammar of American national, racial, and religious identity in literature from the colonial era forward.

Sex: Primary
Work: Absent
Learning: Absent
Religion: Primary

religion-and-sexerotic-as-powershame

religion-and-sex

Infanticide sexualizes the body of the woman on the gallows, marking her body as a site of sexual knowledge before religious and civil authorities.
POAS-RC-081
Biologized discourses veiled religious arguments about sexuality, allowing normalization of specifically religious controls to pass for their disappearance.
POAS-RC-183

erotic-as-power

The haunting sexual character of witchcraft, repressed, returns in the shape of schizophrenia, hysteria, or political vested interests.
POAS-RC-076
The incestuous and frequently forced relationships between slaveholders, their slaves, and their children were documented by abolitionists before Douglass wrote his Narrative.
POAS-RC-144

shame

Segrest is only a 'closet Baptist' insofar as she is a closet lesbian — lesbianism, not Baptism, is most immediately under sanction.
POAS-RC-231
What Puritanism is largely about is the fear of one's own unworthiness, especially unworthiness to be saved — guilt that debilitates the artist.
POAS-RC-261

Illuminates

6 published passages · book excerpt · research analysis

Reader resonance signals for text sources are not wired to this view yet.

Same era

Paul and His Theology: A Brief Sketch

Love's Executioner

survey research methods (applied social research methods)

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

This Boy's Life: A Memoir

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Loading profile…