Rappaccini\u27s Children: American Writers in a Calvinist World

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” tells of a beautiful girl who has, from birth, absorbed the poison from the flowers of her father’s garden. In this allegorical tale of the fallen Garden of Eden, William H. Shurr finds a metaphor for the fate of many American writers, for whom the heritage of Calvinism has been the poisoned fruit of the Garden of the New World. For many American writers, the legacy of the Puritan Fathers has been a pervasive sense of sinfulness and guilt in a violent and unforgiving universe. In this new study Shurr examines how these writers have coped with this heritage. William H. Shurr, who holds degrees in both theology and literature, is professor of English at the University of Tennessee. His earlier book, The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, was co-winner of the 1971 SAMLA Studies Award. An original, far-reaching, and powerful critique of the fate of Calvinism in American culture. It is a work of genuine importance for scholars in every area of American studies. —Sacvan Bercovitchhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1030/thumbnail.jp

The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891

This book is the first to consider the work of Herman Melville’s later years as a whole, in the light of his life and reading during those years and of the intellectual and artistic ambience of the later nineteenth century. With the exception of Billy Budd, almost all of the writing Melville produced between 1857 and 1891 is poetry. Until now little attention has been given to the poetry and it has been customary to view Melville’s final masterpiece, Billy Budd, against the background of the earlier fiction—almost as if the writing of the intervening thirty-four years had not existed. William H. Shurr, who has studied the poems with close attention to the Melville manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, contends that Melville’s poetry merits more attention and appreciation than has hitherto been accorded it. Concerned principally with the maturation of Melville’s darker themes, he has been the first to study the carefully designed sequences in which Melville published his poems. He has also discovered in the poems thematic patterns—among them Melville’s heterodox Christology and his concept of a particular kind of individualism found in what he calls the “transcendent act”—that shed new light on the complexities of Billy Budd. William H. Shurr holds the S.T.L. (theology) from Loyola University and the Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina. He teaches English at Washington State University and serves on the editorial boards of Poe Studies and Emerson Society Quarterly. The Mystery of Iniquity is the 1971 SAMLA Studies Award co-winner.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1031/thumbnail.jp

Scaphites of the “Nodosus Group” from the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian) of the Western Interior of North America

Landman, Neil H., Kennedy, W. James, Cobban, William A., Larson, Neal L. (2010): Scaphites Of The ''Nodosus Group'' From The Upper Cretaceous (Campanian) Of The Western Interior Of North America. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2010 (342): 1-243, DOI: 10.1206/659.1, URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1206/659.