As chaste women devoted to God, nuns are viewed as the purest of the pure. Yet, as females who reject courtship, sex, marriage, child bearing, and materialism, they have been the anathema of how society has proscribed, expected, and regulated women: sex object, wife, mother, and capitalist consumer. They are perceived as otherworldly beings, yet revered for their salt-of-the-earth demeanor. This book illustrates how both English and Spanish Renaissance-era authors latched onto the figure of the nun as a way to evaluate the social construction of womanhood. This analysis of the nun’s role in the popular imagination via literature explores how writers on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide employed the role of the nun to showcase the powerful potential these women possessed in acting out as sanctified subversives. The texts under consideration include William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, María de Zayas’s The Disenchantments of Love, Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun, Catalina de Erauso’s The Lieutenant Nun, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s autobiographical and literary works. No other book addresses these issues through a concentrated study of these authors and their literary works, much less by offering an in-depth discussion of the literature and culture of seventeenth-century England, Spain, and Mexico.

I analyze Sor Juana's literary prowess by elucidating the poetic style in which she was able to express disillusionment with the patriarchy and espouse bold feminist rhetoric while simultaneously living up to the expectations of her religious profession. I demonstrate how Sor Juana's writing positions her as a hybrid figure--pious nun and worldly feminist--who was able to amalgamate the secular and spiritual in ingenious poetry, prose, and drama that articulates both the traditional teachings of Christ and feminist rhetoric in laymen's terms. I conclude my dissertation with a chapter that extends this research into the contemporary era with an analysis of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The clear physical and psychic similarities between the entrapped women of Gilead and the enclosed nuns of Renaissance literature allow me to bridge my examination of concerns for women's agency in patriarchal societies governed with strong Judeo-Christian influences in the early modern era with those of our contemporary era. The militant theocracy and quasi-Medieval religious atmosphere of Gilead helps me round out my arguments from previous chapters and negotiate intersections between the interests of early modern authors and Atwood's post-modern sociopolitical literary activism.

Rodney Clapp asks and answers the question, How can the church provide a significant alternative to the culture in which it is embedded?

In this major reconsideration of Herman Melville’s life and work, Michael Paul Rogin shows that Melville’s novels are connected both to the important issues of his time and to the exploits of his patrician and politically prominent family—which, three generations after its Revolutionary War heroes, produced an alcoholic, a bankrupt, and a suicide. Rogin argues that a history of Melville’s fiction, and of the society represented in it, is also a history of the writer’s family. He describes how that family first engaged Melville in and then isolated him from American political and social life. Melville’s brother and father-in-law are shown to link Moby-Dick to the crisis over expansion and slavery. White-Jacket and Billy Budd, which concern shipboard conflicts between masters and seamen, are related to an execution at sea in which Melville’s cousin played a decisive part. The figure of Melville’s father haunts The Confidence Man, whose subject is the triumph of the marketplace and the absence of authority. A provocative study of one of our supreme literary artists.

We live in a 24/7 culture of endless productivity, workaholism, distraction, burnout, and anxiety--a way of life to which we've sadly grown accustomed. This tired system of "life" ultimately destroys our souls, our bodies, our relationships, our society, and the rest of God's creation. The whole world grows exhausted because humanity has forgotten to enter into God's rest. This book pioneers a creative path to an alternative way of existing. Combining creative storytelling, pastoral sensitivity, practical insight, and relevant academic research, Subversive Sabbath offers a unique invitation to personal Sabbath-keeping that leads to fuller and more joyful lives. A. J. Swoboda demonstrates that Sabbath is both a spiritual discipline and a form of social justice, connects Sabbath-keeping to local communities, and explains how God may actually do more when we do less. He shows that the biblical practice of Sabbath-keeping is God's plan for the restoration and healing of all creation. The book includes a foreword by Matthew Sleeth.

In response to the profound changes in Soviet society in recent years, the author considers the demise of Soviet literature and the emergence of its Russian progeny through the prism of the writers' engagement with fantasy. Viewing the mutual interaction of Soviet/Russian literary output with aspects of the dominant culture such as ideology and politics, Nadya Peterson traces the process of mainstream literary change in the context of broader social change. She explores the subversive character of the fantastic orientation, its Utopian and apocalyptic motifs, and its dialogical relationship with socialist realism, as it steadily gathered force in the latter Soviet decades. The shattering of the mythic colossus did not put an end to these opposing forces, but rather diverted them in various unexpected directions–as the author explains in her concluding chapters on the new "alternative" literatures.