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In Knowing, Seeing, Being, Jennifer L. Leader argues that the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson, and the twentieth-century poet Marianne Moore share a heretofore underrecognized set of religious and philosophical preoccupations. She contends that they represent an alternative tradition within American literature, one that they represent an alternative tradition within American literature, one that differs from Transcendentalism and is grounded in Reformed Protestantism. According to Leader, these three writers' most significant commonality is the Protestant tradition of typology, a rigorous mode of interpreting scripture and nature through which certain figures or phenomena are read as the fulfillment of prophecy and of God's work. Following from their similar ways of reading, they also share philosophical and spiritual questions about language, epistemology (knowing), perception (seeing), and physical and spiritual ontology (being). In connecting Edwards to these two poets, in exploring each writer's typological imagination, and through a series of insightful readings, this innovative book reevaluates three major figures in American intellectual and literary history and compels a reconsideration of these writers and their legacies. -- from back cover Introduction: a history of the work of typology -- Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards: a reconsideration; Beauty and the eye of the beholder: being and desire in Jonathan Edwards's natural typology -- Emily Dickinson. Immersed in the reformed hermeneutic: origins of Dickinson's typological imagination; Reading with "compound vision": Emily Dickinson and the nineteenth-century "paper wars" ; "Myself; the term between": Dickinson's typology of split subjectivity -- Marianne Moore. Rightly dividing the word of truth: Marianne Moore in her reformed tradition; "Part terrestrial, part celestial": "the real" and "the actual" in Moore's revisionist typology; "Integration too tough for infraction": being, ethics, and aesthetics in early and late Moore
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