American Lazarus

Reviews / Votes

American Lazarus launches an important and powerful refiguring of early American literature--a refiguring made possible by contemporary theories of race and colonization, but one governed nevertheless by Brooks's insistence on reading African American and Native American writers of the eighteenth century with rigorous attention to the religious and political contexts that produced them. * Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles * American Lazarus is a stunning resurrection of a buried chapter of American literary history and the redemption of a host of misread, ignored, and undervalued African American and Native American literary artists whose works have long awaited the interpretive powers and methods of Joanna Brooks. This book transforms our reading of American religion, race, history, and literature by reformulating our assumptions about the literary culture of the early Republic. Brooks demonstrates how black and Indian authors used the dominant religion and language to construct the terms and reality of their own survival, redemption, and regeneration. Brooks's revealing, heroic narrative will change how we think about the formation of the nation. * Emory Eliott, University of California, Riverside * In American Lazarus Joanna Brooks applies a new and highly effective paradigm to the emergence of African American and Native American voices in eighteenth-century British America. As she explores the confluence of evangelical religion and revolutionary ideology that gave rise to such writers as Samson Occom, John Marrant, and Prince Hall, Brooks reinvigorates a long tradition of American Studies scholarship. Well-written and learned, American Lazarus should find a wide audience. * Philip F. Gura, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *