Description
Book SynopsisThe enduring search for female salvation in American literature is first expressed through typology, an interpretive framework that pairs type with antitype, historical scriptural promise with future spiritual fulfillment. When Cotton Mather invokes the typos of Esther in Ornaments of the Daughters of Zion, a Puritan conduct book, he offers a female type of divine wisdom, authority and force. In the biblical Book of Esther, Esther acts as a female type of wisdom and redemption, but her story also engages the larger history of Hebrew salvation. In nineteenth-century America, Margaret Fuller seeks to extend the spiritual claims once made by Mather and establish the role of the divine female in the salvation of American culture and society. Fuller supplants the type of male sacrifice with a type of female transfiguration in works such as Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Nathaniel Hawthorne then transforms these iconoclastic ideals into literary life by engaging the multi-faceted figu
Trade ReviewClosely and densely argued, yet nevertheless accessible to the non-specialist, this volume will be of interest to students of biblical interpretation and culture and of American literature. * The Bible Today *
This new study by Ariel Clark Silver offers a significant contribution to the reception history of Esther by focusing on Puritan literature and its aftermath, in particular on those authors most associated with transcendentalism. . . . Silver is successful in going beyond John Gatta’s work on the prominence of Mary in 19th century literature (American Madonna) and in establishing an older paradigm in the person of the Jewish Queen Esther. Silver’s book acts not so much as a corrective but as an expansion of how ancient types of women are helpful to American women in presenting the emergence of a redeemed spiritual figure who accepts responsibility for her actions and acquires moral autonomy in a culture often set against her. * Reading Religion *
Table of ContentsPreface I.The Death of Male Sacrifice: Margaret Fuller and the Flowering of a New God II.Esther as Type: The Search for a Figure of Female Redemption III.‘A’ is for Atonement: Hawthorne and Hester IV.Beyond Redemption: Queen Esther, Zenobia, and Miriam V.The Education Of Esther: Henry Adams and the Eternal Woman VI.The Face Of Female Salvation: Clover Adams and the Art of Transfiguration
