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Sacraments of memory : Catholicism and slavery in contemporary African American literature / Erin Michael Salius Universi.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Gainesville : University Press of Florida, [2018]Description: 1 online resource (217 pages)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780813052304
  • 0813052300
Subject(s): Genre/Form: Additional physical formats: Print version:: Sacraments of memory.DDC classification:
  • 810.9/3828208996073 23
LOC classification:
  • PS508.N3 S25 2018eb
Other classification:
  • online - EBSCO
Online resources:
Contents:
Introduction: Towards a reading of the Catholic margin in contemporary narratives of slavery -- Toni Morrison's sacramental rememory -- A sacred communion -- Catholicism and narrative time -- Catholicism and narrative time, continued.
Summary: "This study argues that Catholicism informs a major genre of African American literature in ways and with a significance that has gone largely unrecognized. Since their emergence in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary narratives of slavery have challenged the traditional historiography of American slavery, radically revising how we remember that "peculiar institution." These fictional works disrupt the form and content of slave autobiography, suggesting that the conventions of Enlightenment rationalism to which antebellum texts were bound could not adequately represent the experience and memory of enslavement. Scholarship on the genre has thus tended to focus on the way it undermines the rationalizing impulse of Enlightenment discourse, which in the U.S. as well as in Europe was determined by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation. But while the scholarly attention to Protestantism has yielded valuable insights, it cannot account for the striking presence of Catholicism at the margins of these texts, nor for the way that the religion is imaginatively linked to radical moments of historical revision. Sacraments of Memory thus proposes a new framework for understanding the revisionist aims of these works, contextualizing the skepticism they exhibit towards historical realism in terms of a Catholic counter-tradition in American literature that has long been associated with superstition and irrationality. The authors in the books all marshal this anti-Enlightenment orientation of Catholicism to disrupt the conventional historiography of American slavery and, this book argues, ultimately, to imagine and embody radically different means of remembering the past."--Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - EBSCO (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (ebsco)1628613

Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-216) and index.

Introduction: Towards a reading of the Catholic margin in contemporary narratives of slavery -- Toni Morrison's sacramental rememory -- A sacred communion -- Catholicism and narrative time -- Catholicism and narrative time, continued.

"This study argues that Catholicism informs a major genre of African American literature in ways and with a significance that has gone largely unrecognized. Since their emergence in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary narratives of slavery have challenged the traditional historiography of American slavery, radically revising how we remember that "peculiar institution." These fictional works disrupt the form and content of slave autobiography, suggesting that the conventions of Enlightenment rationalism to which antebellum texts were bound could not adequately represent the experience and memory of enslavement. Scholarship on the genre has thus tended to focus on the way it undermines the rationalizing impulse of Enlightenment discourse, which in the U.S. as well as in Europe was determined by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation. But while the scholarly attention to Protestantism has yielded valuable insights, it cannot account for the striking presence of Catholicism at the margins of these texts, nor for the way that the religion is imaginatively linked to radical moments of historical revision. Sacraments of Memory thus proposes a new framework for understanding the revisionist aims of these works, contextualizing the skepticism they exhibit towards historical realism in terms of a Catholic counter-tradition in American literature that has long been associated with superstition and irrationality. The authors in the books all marshal this anti-Enlightenment orientation of Catholicism to disrupt the conventional historiography of American slavery and, this book argues, ultimately, to imagine and embody radically different means of remembering the past."--Provided by publisher.

Description based on online resource; title from resource home page (University Press Scholarship, viewed February 25, 2022).