"Arguing that Muslim sources exercised a formative impact on U.S. literary origins,

this book traces a genealogy of Islamic influence that spans America's critical century of self-definition, unfolding from the 1770s to the 1870s. Focusing on celebrated writers from the Revolution to Reconstruction, I excavate Arabic and Persian precedents that shaped U.S. authorial lives and letters, newly exposing neglected witnesses to American literary engagement with Islamic texts and traditions.

[...] Reflecting the increasingly transatlantic an hemispheric perspective of American Studies, this book builds upon recent remappings of U.S. literary origins, defining early American authorship as a dynamic site of global exchange, rather than as an integral outcome of national exceptionalism. [1] 

Pioneered by prominent Americanists including Wai Chee Dimock, Lawrence Buell, Paul Giles, and Susan Manning, this transnational approach to early U.S. literature has including a rising interesting in the Middle East in general, and Islam specifically; exceptional studies authored recently by Brian Yothers (2007) and Jacob Rama Berman (2012), for instance, have advanced a twenty-first-century trajectory of Americanist engagement with the Muslim Middle East that was heralded by Timothy Marr's foundational The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism -- a 2006 study that superbly mapped an expansive "critical history of cultural imagination." [2] 

[...] Rather than an abstract appraisal of American literature's trasnational contexts, The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture emphasizes the practical and the private, exposing the Islamic interiors and interiority of early U.S. authorship. 

Domesticated in a double sense, literal and literary, Muslim sources are seen to permeate the personal lives and labors of iconic American writers, inhabiting their home environs and household writings.  

Extracting Muslim threads woven into the familiar fabric of U.S. letters and sermons, journals and journalism, memorials and marginalia, I argue that the identities and idioms of foundational American authors were catalyzed through creative, and occasionally covert, acts of Islamic engagement. 

My study's emphasis on personal moments of Muslim source reception is sustained, moreover, by the unpublished materials it unearths, recovering tangible witnesses to writers' individual interests in Islamic texts. 

Instead of novel theoretical frame, it is fresh evidence that supports this study's critical intervention, uncovering manuscripts that reveal private American readings of Islamic precedents, or gesture to personal contexts for American authors' published texts on Islam. 

[...] Addressing global influences on icons of U.S. cultures, The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture also pursues a domestic family history, its five body chapters arranged in overlapping chronologies, stretching from revolutionary beginnings to the aftermath of the Civil War, treating successively Ezra Stiles (1727-1795); William Bentley (1759-1819); Washington Irving (1783-1859); Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880); and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).  

Nationally implicated, these five figures have been traditionally framed in terms of their "American" achievements, recognized as U.S. precursors in their respective pursuits, from theology to fiction, Abolitionism to Romanticism. Surprisingly, however, it is The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture that marks the first study to synthesize these authors of American renown, their shared appeal to Muslim sources ironically forging new links between these national literati. [5]

-Jeffrey Einboden, The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture: Muslim Sources from the Revolution to Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. xi-xiii.