ABSTRACT
The most studied of America’s theologians, Jonathan Edwards has been discussed primarily in terms of intellectual and cultural history. Literary critics tended to approach him biographically, or as an influence on other writers, rather than as an author in his own right. This neglect slowly changed after 1949, when studies of Edwards’s management of imagery, especially in his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, led to later considerations of his experiments in structure, especially in his contrived memoir known today as “Personal Narrative”. Although Edwards is valued more for his theological thought than for his verbal management of this thought, there is today a better appreciation of the relationship between his beliefs and his literary strategies, including his editorial practices.
