The most familiar way of conjoining religion and queerness in America is proscriptive. This is so despite the vivid presence of non-normative sexualities in the sacred stories of nearly all religions and the formative labors of queer-identified persons in their ranks. In invocations of American religion the default religion is likely to be Christian; the default Christianity, Protestant; the primary office of religion, morality; and the morality in question, sexual morality. In this way, the very category of religion in America is shaped by the pathologizing of non-normative sexualities. If to embrace queer lives is to depart from faithful Christian witness, then all departures from right religion bear the taint of suspect desire. But exile is not the only place of queerness in American religious lives, as literary history amply confirms. By what paths did early American texts come to identify religion as heteronormative? And how has a more generative religious imagination of queerness come to shape American literature? This chapter tracks these questions by moving between Puritan invocations of queerness as civic and spiritual threat and later rejoinders in American letters.

This chapter covers literary representations of prostheses in a wide range of historical periods to outline the difference that literature can make in challenging the dominant technological narrative and reframing it in terms of human uses. Taking as emblematic a pair of short stories by William Faulkner (“The Leg”) and Flannery O’Connor (“Good Country People”), Hall argues that these works do more than simply register shifts in prosthetic technology, but also challenge normalizing discourses through forms that “resist any urge toward stable order, whether narrative, social, or bodily.” “Language and storytelling are important to our understanding of prosthesis,” Hall argues, “because anxieties, hopes, and fantasies about enablement, modification, and enhancement, as well as the powerful fiction of the ‘normate,’ are reinforced but also renegotiated in literary and cultural spaces.”

The category of Civil War literature is not bounded by historical designation or lived experience; instead, this genre encompasses a broad range of reflections and reconstructions concerning the legacy imparted by the war. Beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, contemporary evaluations of the civil rights movement mobilize competing logics of Civil War memory. These versions of Civil War memory take shape in both personal and political registers, the subjective nature of which simultaneously confounds and perpetually renews understandings of the past. Three developments occurred in the 1950s and 1960s that brought such contradictory remembrance to light: the desegregation of public schools via Brown v. Board of Education, the commemoration of the Civil War’s centennial anniversary, and the deaths of the last remaining Civil War veterans. This final event characterizes the relevant work produced in both the civil rights movement and our contemporary moment, as writers continuously work to preserve, alter, or resist their ancestors’ history in ways informed by the interests and conflicts of the present.

This chapter explores the significance of Gothic to an emergent American modernist aesthetic, surveying a range of current theories of Gothic and focusing particularly on the legacies of slavery and the politics of segregation in the American South, but also evoking other historical traumas. European modernism is conventionally understood largely to have disavowed Gothic romance; by contrast, under the influence of William Faulkner and others, the particular strand of fiction associated with the Southern Literary Renaissance developed Gothic motifs into a distinctive idiom through which to explore themes of otherness and difference and to reflect on the significance of the individual and collective past, in depictions both disavowing and incorporating everyday deviance amid a society of social taboos against miscegenation, incest, homosexuality that were everywhere symbolically enforced though commonly violated in practice. In doing so, and in developing an ambivalent, paradoxical body of writings that might best be described as ‘modernist regional Gothic’, such writers as Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor took Gothic in a radically new direction.

This chapter examines how the traditionalist wing of the conservative movement identified Flannery O’Connor as an important young writer who epitomized traditionalist conservatism’s faith in the sophisticated fiction of high culture. However, the chapter also shows how shifting conservative literary tastes could be discerned in movement conservatism’s contemporaneous reception of Ayn Rand. Unlike O’Connor and traditionalist conservatives who valued aesthetic form over abstract ideas, Rand and the libertarian conservatives at National Review who championed her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) were concerned above all with advancing a firm set of ideological principles through the medium of fiction. While Buckley eventually ousted Rand from the conservative movement, her immense popularity with conservatives of the era foreshadowed the movement’s growing distrust of literary fiction and its eventual embrace of ideological purity and cultural populism. By close reading selected works by O’Connor and Rand, two fundamentally different fiction writers with material and symbolic linkages to the conservative movement, this chapter reveals not only the importance of fiction as a crucial nodal point in these debates, but also how racially fraught literary representations of totalitarian collectivism proved to be foundational for conceptualizing modern American conservatism.