Missionary Positions: Evangelicalism and Empire in American Fiction

Contents

Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Part I. Nineteenth-Century Beginnings Missionaries on the American Frontier: Mythmaking 1. Remaking the Myth of a Chosen People in Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie 21 2. Evangelizing the Indians under Manifest Destiny in Cooper’s The Oak Openings 41 Part II. Mid-Nineteenth to Twentieth Century Missionaries Abroad: Contested Ideologies 3. Melville’s Indictment of the Missionaries in Typee and Omoo 65 4. The Missionary Novel in Decline, Mark Twain, and America’s Second Manifest Destiny 89 5. Revival: Missionary Reform in Alice Hobart’s Yang and Yin and Missionary Rebuke in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom 107 Part III. Mid-Twentieth Century to the Present America’s Missionary Identity: Retrospectives and Reimaginings 6. Contesting America’s Missionary Destiny in Sinclair Lewis’s The God-Seeker 133 7. The Reluctant Embrace of American Missionary Imperialism in James Michener’s Hawaii 152 8. Contemporary Developments: Hersey’s The Call, Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, Grisham’s The Testament, and LaHaye’s “Left Behind” Novels 176 Afterword 197 Notes 201 Bibliography 227 Index 249 ...