Poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) proved a significant contributor to American Protestant hymnody--since 1843, more than 2,100 hymnals published in the United States have included adaptations of his works--despite the fact that Whittier never considered himself a hymnist. This book compares and contrasts Whittier's original published texts with versions adapted as hymns, exhibiting the hymnodic elements of his poetry and displaying the textual changes to Whittier's lines by hymnal editors from a variety of denominations. The work offers in-depth comparative studies of many of his poems and their resultant hymns, a catalogue of hymns-from-poems, a chronology of Whittier's life and works, notes, bibliography and index.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930), African American novelist, editor, journalist, playwright, historian, and public intellectual, used fiction to explore and intervene in the social, racial, and political challenges of her era. Her particular form of cultural activism was groundbreaking for its time and continues to influence and inspire authors and scholars today. This collection of essays constitutes a new phase in the full historical and literary recovery of her work. JoAnn Pavletich argues that considered from the broadest of perspectives, Hopkins’s life work occupies itself with the critique and creation of epistemologies that control racialized knowledge and experience. Whether in representations of a critical contemporary problem such as lynching, imperialism, or pan-African unity or in representations of African American women’s voices, Hopkins’s texts create new knowledge and new frames for understanding it. The essays in this collection engage this knowledge, articulating nuanced understandings of Hopkins’s era and her innovative writing practices, opening new doors for the next generation of Hopkins scholarship. With contributions from well-established Hopkins scholars such as John Gruesser (editor of The Unruly Voice) and Hanna Wallinger (author of Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography), the collection also includes important new scholars on Hopkins such as Elizabeth Cali, Edlie Wong, and others.

Reconsidering Longfellow is the first collection of scholarly essays in several decades devoted entirely to the work and afterlife of the most popular and widely read writer in American literature. The essays, written by a new generation of Longfellow scholars, cover the entire range of Longfellow’s work, from the early poetry to the wildly successful epics of his middle period (Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha) to his Chaucerian collection of stories published after the Civil War, Tales of a Wayside Inn. Separate contributions discuss Longfellow’s financial dealings, his preoccupation with his children, and his interest in the visual arts, as well as the tremendous role his poetry did and will once again play in American literature classrooms in the U.S. All essays were written specifically for the volume. Many of them rely on unpublished archival sources from the Longfellow collections at the Longfellow House-George Washington National Historic Site and at Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In nearly a half-century of missionary work throughout England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, brothers John and Charles Wesley found the southwestern county of Cornwall to be among their most serious theological and social challenges. Eighteenth-century Cornwall lacked population centers, and small towns and villages were isolated by inadequate roads. The adult population consisted mainly of miners, fisherman and smugglers--men more interested in the bulk of their pocketbooks than in the status of their souls. And the clergy of the Church of England overwhelmingly opposed the Wesleys and their itinerant preachers, encouraging Anglicans to disrupt the Wesleys' outdoor services and to attack and burn Methodist preaching houses. Although the Wesleys made some evangelical progress in Cornwall, the question remained upon John Wesley's death in 1791: did the mission to Cornwall succeed or fail? This book considers the mission with a close reading of the Wesleys writings, and covers the overall history of 18th-century British Methodism and its contribution to the religious and social history of the British Empire.

This is the first full biography of Biblical scholar and theological seminary professor James Strong (1822-1894). It describes his upbringing, early and higher education, the schools and colleges where he taught, his academic colleagues, his contributions to the development of nineteenth-century American Methodism, and his numerous publications--particularly his Biblical Concordance (1894), which continues as a standard and essential reference work. It includes edited versions of selected sermons and letters never before published, as well as comments from his students, the details of his experience in the development of the early nineteenth-century American railroad system, and detailed obituaries and reactions to his death.

Hymn singing is vital to both the beliefs and emotion of worship in all religions, especially Protestant Christianity. With the rising popularity of contemporary worship, traditional hymnody is in danger of being lost to Christian memory. This book reflects the intellectual excellence, the religious devotion, and the widespread influence of over two hundred hymns. Many have very poignant life situations which prompted the writing of hymns or poems that musicians composed to enhance the singability or the majesty of the lyrics. Haynes has done careful research into the life and specific occasions when inspiration led to the gift of a hymn to posterity. These vignettes are meaningful for private devotional use and in worship bulletins to make hymn singing more meaningful.