CANTON – A SUNY Canton faculty member's newest book describes the religious beliefs of female authors as an integral part of American literature.

Associate Professor and Co-Chief Diversity Officer Emily Hamilton-Honey recently co-authored "Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven" with her colleague, Seattle Pacific University Associate Professor Jennifer McFarlane-Harris. Hamilton-Honey teaches English and humanities, and McFarlane-Harris teaches English and cultural studies, among other courses.

The collection, published by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, analyzes the theme of the afterlife as described through the works of authors Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Martha Finley, Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, Zilpha Elaw, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Belinda Marden Pratt, and others.

According to the new book's abstract, the writers' works were immersed in the moral debates consuming churches and national politics. Each of them believed that religion was necessary to maintain a morally healthy nation. Though they each believed in different ways to reach the afterlife, they were all working to make earth a step closer to heaven, to convert others to bring about a life after moral reform.

Hamilton-Honey has previously published "Turning the Pages of American Girlhood" and "Girls to the Rescue" focused on young women's series fiction, and about a dozen other publications. McFarlane-Harris has published essays on theology-making in Black women's conversion narratives and poetry. She also co-authored a chapter in the collection "Blackness in Opera" on racial difference in Verdi's Aida.