Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-12-2025

Abstract

Five of the nineteen contributors to Preaching and the Sermon in the Twentieth Century are members of English departments, so it is somewhat ironic that none of their chapters could be categorized as “literary studies” (they are instead in the sections for history, book history, media studies, and digital humanities). This presentation is intended to offer a perspective that is not represented in that collection.

In about five minutes each, I will survey the three elements mentioned in my title:

1. Sermons and literature. This section will address how sermons can be influenced by other forms of literature, and influence them in turn. This includes medieval clergy deploying theatrical techniques in their preaching; Shakespeare alluding to material from the Church of England’s official book of homilies in his plays; and Dolan Hubbard’s idea that “the blues are the sermon without limits, and the sermon is the blues with limits.”

2. Sermons in literature. This section will examine the genre of the “sermon novel,” which I have defined as “both works that contain sermons and books that are essentially sermons themselves.” The long list of canonical authors represented in this category includes George Eliot, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Alice Walker.

3. Sermons as literature. This section will support the idea that sermons can be considered “literary” in their own right. Scholarly studies focusing on this aspect of the topic include W. Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson; Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter E. McCullough, The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600-1750; and Eric Mackerness, The Heeded Voice: Studies in the Literary Status of the Anglican Sermon, 1830-1900.

As this outline might suggest, the presentation will be less a work of original scholarship and more of a literature review, drawing on the secondary research I did for Preaching and the Sermon in the Twentieth Century but wound up not including in the book. I am confident that it will nonetheless be of interest to the attendees, and spark some interesting discussions during my panel and beyond.

Comments

Copyright 2025 Ellison.

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