"Dare you see a soul at the white heat? Then crouch within the door." We will take Emily Dickinson's challenge as one of our coordinates in this course. We will read the works of selected women authors in America, seeking to understand the experience of religious emotion as well as the varieties of its expression. While we will focus on the relationship between spirituality and literary production, we will also explore a variety of other expressive modes available to women, including dance, painting, basketmaking, quilting, and reading as performance. We will read from a range of texts and genres, including conversion and captivity narratives, letters, poems, and diaries. Our selections will be attentive to such issues as class affiliation, the production of public and "domestic" utterance, and the disciplining of female speech.