Table of Contents
Re-inventing the Puritans: George Bancroft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the birth of Endicott's ghost -- Revolutionary enactment: Frederick Douglass, the African American metanoia, and the cultural work of the Declaration of Independence -- Holiness and the sanctification gap: Sojourner Truth, African American women, and the cultural work of doing the Word -- Closing the sanctification gap: doing the Word in Uncle Tom's cabin -- Abraham Lincoln as America's revivalist -- The myth of the oppositional West: Mark Twain's declaration of in/dependence at Whittier's seventieth birthday celebration -- Cultural conflict makes the man: Sinclair Lewis as pagan, 100 percent American, and Nobel laureate -- Trilling's Frost versus Kennedy's Frost: competing poles of a paradox within America's regnant myth.