Major Works of Postsecular Literary Criticism, by literary-historical period and/or geography
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PN49 .C355 2016ISBN: 1107483913Publication Date: 2016-09-12Each essay in this Companion examines one or more literary texts and a religious tradition to illustrate how we can understand both literature and religion better by looking at them in tandem. Unlike most literature and religion books, which tend to focus on Christianity and take a highly theoretical approach inappropriate for non-specialists, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion offers an accessible treatment of both Dharmic and Abrahamic traditions. It provides close readings of texts rather than surveys of large topics, making it an ideal resource for undergraduate and graduate students of literature and religion.
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PN49 .R745 2016ISBN: 9780415834056Publication Date: 2016-05-02This unique and comprehensive volume looks at the study of literature and religion from a contemporary critical perspective. Including discussion of global literature and world religions, this Companion looks at: Key moments in the story of religion and literary studies from Matthew Arnold through to the impact of 9/11 A variety of theoretical approaches to the study of religion and literature Different ways that religion and literature are connected from overtly religious writing, to subtle religious readings Analysis of key sacred texts and the way they have been studied, re-written, and questioned by literature Political implications of work on religion and literature Thoroughly introduced and contextualised, this volume is an engaging introduction to this huge and complex field.
"What is Religion and Literature?" by Call Number: Article - JSTOR Arts and Sciences VPublication Date: 2009Journal Information: Religion & literature, 2009, Vol.41 (2)
Introduction to the issue, its central questions, and an overview of the essays contained within.
The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology by Call Number: eBookISBN: 0199544484Publication Date: 2009-05-05The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology is a defining volume of essays in which leading international scholars apply an interdisciplinary approach to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology. The volume first offers a chronological account ofkey moments in the formation of the tradition; goes on to demonstrate literary ways of reading the Bible, theological ways of reading literature, and literary conceptions of theological texts; and finally explores the great themes that have preoccupied the Jewish and Christian traditions. Framingeditorial essays describe the history, the cultural implications, and the methodological issues of this now popular interdisciplinary study, before speculating as to its possible futures in a postmodern, multicultural world.
Natural Supernaturalism by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PN603 .A3ISBN: 0393006093Publication Date: 1973-08-17In this remarkable book, M. H. Abrams definitively studies the Romantic Age (1789-1835)--the age in which Shelley claimed that "the literature of England has arisen as it were from a new birth." Abrams shows that the major poets of the age had in common important themes, modes of expression, and ways of feeling and imagining; that the writings of these poets were an integral part of a comprehensive intellectual tendency which manifested itself in philosophy as well as poetry, in England and in Germany; and that this tendency was causally related to drastic political and social changes of the age. But Abrams offers more than a work of scholarship, for he ranges before and after, to place the age in Western culture. he reveals what is traditional and what is revolutionary in the period, providing insights into those same two forces in the ideas of today. He shows that central Romantic ideas and forms of imagination were secularized versions of traditional theological concepts, imagery, and design, and that modern literature participates in the same process. Our comprehension of this age and of our own time is deepened by a work astonishing in its learning, vision, and humane understanding.
The Great Code by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PN56.B47 F7ISBN: 9780151369027Publication Date: 1982-03-01An examination of the influence of the Bible on Western art and literature and on the Western creative imagination in general. Frye persuasively presents the Bible as a unique text distinct from all other epics and sacred writings. "No one has set forth so clearly, so subtly, or with such cogent energy as Frye the literary aspect of our biblical heritage" (New York Times Book Review). Indices.
Life to the Whole Being by ISBN: 0842500618Publication Date: 2022-04-01"Literature can provide the language for spiritual experiences-and encountering literature can be the source of spiritual experiences. As Matthew Wickman argues, literatures powers will lead readers to increase their ability to recognize and understand spiritual experiences"--
Beyond the Story by Call Number: eBook & UI Main Library Stacks PS221 .L25 2019ISBN: 0268106258Publication Date: 2019-10-31Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism argues that theology is crucial to understanding the power of contemporary American stories. By drawing on the theories of M. M. Bakhtin, Christian personalism, and contemporary phenomenology, Lake argues that literary fiction activates an irreducibly personal intersubjectivity between author, reader, and characters. Stories depend on a dignity-granting valuation of the particular lives of ordinary people, which is best described as an act of love that mirrors the love of the divine. Through original readings of the fiction of Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, and others, Lake enters into a dialogue with postsecular theory and cognitive literary studies to reveal the limits of sociobiology's approach to culture. The result is a book that will remind readers how storytelling continually reaffirms the transcendent value of human beings in an inherently personal cosmos. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of theology and literary studies, as well as a broad audience of readers seeking to engage on a deeper level with contemporary literature.- “The Rituals of Our Resecularization: Literature between Faith and Knowledge" by Call Number: Article - JSTOR Arts and Sciences VPublication Date: 2014Journal Information: Religion & literature, 2014, Vol.46 (2/3), p.9-33
A prerequisite for conceptualizing the study of religion and literature is understanding how the relationship between these fields has been troubled. In this essay, I show how the disciplinary study of literature has been characterized by secularism, dominated by the distinction between faith and knowledge, such that literary study is valued in terms of the production of knowledge and, consequently, association with belief makes it suspect. This secularism nevertheless confesses its ineradicable religiousness, I argue, in the rituals by which we must reinvent our claims to secularity. Literature and belief converge at the site of meaning-making, but institutional pressures and epistemologies work to prevent our living up to that insight. I suggest postsecular literary studies as a way through this impasse. Such an approach would be true to our best insights about language, recognizing the connection between literature and religion not as an obstacle but as a positive condition for meaning-making. 
Rituals of Spontaneity by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PR448.S75 B73 2006ISBN: 9781932792119Publication Date: 2006-09-19In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a new-found love of spontaneity transformed Christian worship and revolutionized the Enlightenment's "culture of sensibility." Rituals of Spontaneity tells the story of how and why spontaneity came to be so revered. Using archival material and works of Bunyan, Shaftesbury, Goldsmith, Smart and Wordsworth, Branch shows that the rise of spontaneity was intimately connected to the forces of commerce and science at the dawn of the Enlightenment. By focusing on the language in which spontaneity was defended and on its psychological repercussions, Rituals of Spontaneity challenges previous understanding of secularization and demonstrates the deep, often troubling connections between religion and secularism in modernity. Winner of the Book of the Year Award for the Conference on Christianity and Literature.
Susannah Brietz Monta's books, including Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2005, paperback 2009; winner, Book of the Year award, Conference on Christianity and Literature), Teaching Early Modern English Prose (MLA, 2010, co-edited with Margaret W. Ferguson), and A Catholic Reads The Faerie Queene: Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune (Manchester UP, 2016). She was the editor of Religion and Literature from 2008 to 2015, and is currently a co-editor of Spenser Studies. She is a founding co-editor of the series Catholicisms, ca. 1450-1800 for Durham University's Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and has served as vice-president and president of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference.
Toward a Sacramental Poetics by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PN49 .T58 2021ISBN: 0268201498Publication Date: 2021-12-15Distinguished theologians and literary scholars explore the workings of the sacred and the sacramental in language and literature. What does a sacramental poetics offer that secular cultural theory, for all of its advances, may have missed? How does a sacred understanding of the world differ from a strictly secular one? This volume develops the theory of "sacramental poetics" advanced by Regina Schwartz in her 2008 book on English Reformation writers, taking the theory in new directions while demonstrating how enduring and widespread this poetics is. Toward a Sacramental Poetics addresses two urgent questions we have inherited from a half century of secular critical thought. First, how do we understand the relationship between word and thing, sign and signified, other than as some naive direct representation or as a completely arbitrary language game? And, second, how can the subject experience the world beyond instrumentalizing it? The contributors conclude that a sacramental poetics responds to both questions, offering an understanding of the sign that, by pointing beyond itself, suggests wonder. The contributors explore a variety of topics in relation to sacramental poetics, including political theology, miracles, modernity, translation and transformation, and the metaphysics of love. They draw from diverse resources, from Dante to Hopkins, from Richard Hooker to Stoker's Dracula, from the King James Bible to Wallace Stevens. Toward a Sacramental Poetics is an important contribution to studies of religion and literature, the sacred and the secular, literary theory, and theologies of aesthetics. Contributors: Regina M. Schwartz, Patrick J. McGrath, Rowan Williams, Subha Mukherji, Stephen Little, Kevin Hart, John Milbank, Hent de Vries, Jean-Luc Marion, Ingolf U. Dalferth, Lori Branch, and Paul Mariani.
The Renaissance Bible by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BS500 .S426 1994ISBN: 1602583099Publication Date: 2010-06-30The Renaissance Bible skillfully navigates the immense but neglected materials spanning the gap between medieval biblical scholarship and the rise of Higher Criticism. Debora Kuller Shuger powerfully demonstrates the disciplinary fusion of Renaissance biblical scholarship--in which the Bible remained the primary locus for cultural, anthropological, and psychological reflection--against modern historians' penchant for bracketing all things religious when reimagining the Renaissance world. Despite the considerable ground she covers and the interdisciplinary nature of her subject, Shuger never roves. Her penetrating focus casts remarkable light on her subject, especially Renaissance writers' use of the Passion. Their concerns emerge as surprisingly contemporary, inviting the reader to reflect on such relevant topics as selfhood, violence, and gender.
Milton and the Post-Secular Present by Call Number: eBook & UI Main Library Stacks PR3588 .M57 2011ISBN: 9780804776509Publication Date: 2011-08-09Our post-secular present, argues Feisal Mohamed, has much to learn from our pre-secular past. Through a consideration of poet and polemicist John Milton, this book explores current post-secularity, an emerging category that it seeks to clarify and critique. It examines ethical and political engagement grounded in belief, with particular reference to the thought of Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Gayatri C. Spivak. Taken to an extreme, such engagement produces the cult of the suicide bomber. But the suicide bomber has also served as a convenient bogey for those wishing to distract us from the violence in Western and Christian traditions and for those who would dismiss too easily the vigorous iconoclasm that belief can produce. More than any other poet, Milton alerts us to both anti-humane and liberationist aspects of belief and shows us relevant dynamics of language by which such commitment finds expression.- “Literature and the Postsecular: Paradise Lost?” by Call Number: Article - JSTOR Arts and Sciences VPublication Date: 2009Journal Information: Religion & literature, 2009, Vol.41 (3), p.98-106
The Cambridge Companion to Paradise Lost by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PR3562 .C336 2014ISBN: 9781107029460Publication Date: 2014-04-28Per Lori Branch - Of note, "The Pre-Secular Politics of Paradise Lost" by Paul Stevens. Fifteen short, accessible essays exploring the most important topics and themes in John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost. The essays invite readers to begin their own independent exploration of the poem by equipping them with useful background knowledge, introducing them to key passages, and acquainting them with the current state of critical debates. Chapters are arranged to mirror the way the poem itself unfolds, offering exactly what readers need as they approach each movement of its grand design. Part I introduces the characters who frame the poem's story and set its plot and theological dynamics in motion. Part II deals with contextual issues raised by the early books, while Part III examines the epic's central and final episodes. The volume concludes with a meditation on the history of the poem's reception and a detailed guide to further reading, offering students and teachers of Milton fresh critical insights and resources for continuing scholarship.
Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain by Call Number: eBook & UI Main Library Stacks PR448.R45 A53 2012ISBN: 9781421404806Publication Date: 2012-05-01In the eighteenth century, British Methodism was an object of both derision and desire. Many popular eighteenth-century works ridiculed Methodists, yet often the very same plays, novels, and prints that cast Methodists as primitive, irrational, or deluded also betrayed a thinly cloaked fascination with the experiences of divine presence attributed to the new evangelical movement. Misty G. Anderson argues that writers, actors, and artists used Methodism as a concept to interrogate the boundaries of the self and the fluid relationships between religion and literature, between reason and enthusiasm, and between theater and belief. Imagining Methodism situates works by Henry Fielding, John Cleland, Samuel Foote, William Hogarth, Horace Walpole, Tobias Smollett, and others alongside the contributions of John Wesley, Charles Wesley, and George Whitefield in order to understand how Methodism's brand of "experimental religion" was both born of the modern world and perceived as a threat to it. Anderson's analysis of reactions to Methodism exposes a complicated interlocking picture of the religious and the secular, terms less transparent than they seem in current critical usage. Her argument is not about the lives of eighteenth-century Methodists; rather, it is about Methodism as it was imagined in the work of eighteenth-century British writers and artists, where it served as a sign of sexual, cognitive, and social danger. By situating satiric images of Methodists in their popular contexts, she recaptures a vigorous cultural debate over the domains of religion and literature in the modern British imagination. Rich in cultural and literary analysis, Anderson's argument will be of interest to students and scholars of the eighteenth century, religious studies, theater, and the history of gender.- Rituals of Spontaneity by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PR448.S75 B73 2006ISBN: 9781932792119Publication Date: 2006-09-19In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a new-found love of spontaneity transformed Christian worship and revolutionized the Enlightenment's "culture of sensibility." Rituals of Spontaneity tells the story of how and why spontaneity came to be so revered. Using archival material and works of Bunyan, Shaftesbury, Goldsmith, Smart and Wordsworth, Branch shows that the rise of spontaneity was intimately connected to the forces of commerce and science at the dawn of the Enlightenment. By focusing on the language in which spontaneity was defended and on its psychological repercussions, Rituals of Spontaneity challenges previous understanding of secularization and demonstrates the deep, often troubling connections between religion and secularism in modernity. Winner of the Book of the Year Award for the Conference on Christianity and Literature.
Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PR830.B48 S45 2021ISBN: 1108491030Publication Date: 2021-03-25Literary histories of the novel tend to assume that religion naturally gives way to secularism, with the novel usurping the Bible after the Enlightenment. This book challenges that teleological conception of literary history by focusing on scenes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fiction where the Bible appears as a physical object. Situating those scenes in wider circuits of biblical criticism, Bible printing, and devotional reading, Seidel cogently demonstrates that such scenes reveal a great deal about the artistic ambitions of the novels themselves and point to the different ways those novels reconfigured their readers' relationships to the secular world. With insightful readings of the appearance of the Bible as a physical object in fiction by John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, and Laurence Sterne, this book contends that the English novel rises with the English Bible, not after it.
Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PR858.A785 R44 2020ISBN: 1108835902Publication Date: 2020-07-09Although there were no self-avowed British atheists before the 1780s, authors including Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sarah Fielding, Phebe Gibbes, and William Cowper worried extensively about atheism's dystopian possibilities, and routinely represented atheists as being beyond the pale of human sympathy. Challenging traditional formulations of secularization that equate modernity with unbelief, Reeves reveals how reactions against atheism rather helped sustain various forms of religious belief throughout the Age of Enlightenment. He demonstrates that hostility to unbelief likewise produced various forms of religious ecumenicalism, with authors depicting non-Christian theists from around Britain's emerging empire as sympathetic allies in the fight against irreligion. Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century traces a literary history of atheism in eighteenth-century Britain for the first time, revealing a relationship between atheism and secularization far more fraught than has previously been supposed.
- Natural Supernaturalism by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PN603 .A3ISBN: 0393006093Publication Date: 1973-08-17In this remarkable new book, M. H. Abrams definitively studies the Romantic Age (1789-1835)--the age in which Shelley claimed that "the literature of England has arisen as it were from a new birth." Abrams shows that the major poets of the age had in common important themes, modes of expression, and ways of feeling and imagining; that the writings of these poets were an integral part of a comprehensive intellectual tendency which manifested itself in philosophy as well as poetry, in England and in Germany; and that this tendency was causally related to drastic political and social changes of the age. But Abrams offers more than a work of scholarship, for he ranges before and after, to place the age in Western culture. he reveals what is traditional and what is revolutionary in the period, providing insights into those same two forces in the ideas of today. He shows that central Romantic ideas and forms of imagination were secularized versions of traditional theological concepts, imagery, and design, and that modern literature participates in the same process. Our comprehension of this age and of our own time is deepened by a work astonishing in its learning, vision, and humane understanding.
The Book of God by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PR448.T45 J34 2007ISBN: 0812239792Publication Date: 2006-12-26The Book of God is a penetrating study of the argument from design as it emerged and circulated in the romantic era. This argument holds that the intricacy and complexity of the natural world points to a divine designer and that nature is to be read as God's book. A literary and philosophical study of this idea, The Book of God revisits the familiar equation of romanticism, modernity, and secularization. Colin Jager eschews classic formulations of the thesis that societies secularize as they modernize, arguing instead that secularization is complexly interwoven with modernity rather than simply opposed to it. This revised concept of secularization reveals how arguments about God's designing intentions structure a romantic modernity that is neither progressive nor entirely secular. Tracing this understanding through diverse texts, ranging from philosophy and theology to poetry and fiction, Jager argues that the idea of design functions as both source and interlocutor for many of romanticism's most famous topics. The book concludes with current controversies over intelligent design and evolution, arguing for a historically informed approach to modernity's attempts to divide the religious from the secular. The book's chronological and thematic range will make it of interest to students of religion and of intellectual and cultural history, as well as literary scholars.
Unquiet Things by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PR448.R45 J34 2015ISBN: 0812246640Publication Date: 2014-11-06In Great Britain during the Romantic period, governmental and social structures were becoming more secular as religion was privatized and depoliticized. If the discretionary nature of religious practice permitted spiritual freedom and social differentiation, however, secular arrangements produced new anxieties. Unquiet Things investigates the social and political disorders that arise within modern secular cultures and their expression in works by Jane Austen, Horace Walpole, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley among others. Emphasizing secularism rather than religion as its primary analytic category, Unquiet Things demonstrates that literary writing possesses a distinctive ability to register the discontent that characterizes the mood of secular modernity. Colin Jager places Romantic-era writers within the context of a longer series of transformations begun in the Reformation, and identifies three ways in which romanticism and secularism interact: the melancholic mood brought on by movements of reform, the minoritizing capacity of literature to measure the disturbances produced by new arrangements of state power, and a prospective romantic thinking Jager calls "after the secular." The poems, novels, and letters of the romantic period reveal uneasy traces of the spiritual past, haunted by elements that trouble secular politics; at the same time, they imagine new and more equitable possibilities for the future. In the twenty-first century, Jager contends, we are still living within the terms of the romantic response to secularism, when literature and philosophy first took account of the consequences of modernity.
Mark Knight's books, including Chesterton and Evil (Fordham University Press, 2004), Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature (co-authored with Emma Mason, Oxford University Press, 2006), An Introduction to Religion and Literature (Continuum, 2009), and Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel (The Ohio State University Press, 2019). He has co-edited collections on religion and literature for Ashgate (2006) and Continuum (2009), co-edited Literature and the Bible: A Reader (Routledge, 2013), and edited The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion (Routledge, 2016). Currently, Mark is writing Oscar Wilde: A New Testament (under contract with Oxford University Press) and editing The Cambridge Companion to Religion in Victorian Literary Culture (under contract with Cambridge University Press). He is the General Editor of the journal Literature and Theology, co-editor (with Emma Mason) of the book series, New Directions in Religion and LIterature (Bloomsbury), and co-editor (with Charles LaPorte) of a forthcoming special issue ('Talking About Religion in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literary Studies') for the journal MLQ. Mark co-leads the Religion and Spiritualities caucus for the North American Victorian Studies Association, and has previously co-directed two NEH summer seminars on religion, secularism and the novel, with Lori Branch (2016, 2019).
The Disappearance of God by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PR469 .R4 M5ISBN: 9780252069109Publication Date: 1963A landmark work of literary criticism by one of the foremost interpreters of nineteenth-century England, The Disappearance of God confronts the consciousness of an absent (though perhaps still existent) God in the writings of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. J. Hillis Miller surveys the intellectual and material developments that conspired to cut man off from God--among other factors the city, developments within Christianity, subjectivism, and the emergence of the modern historical sense--and shows how each writer's body of work reflects a sustained response to the experience of God's disappearance.
God and the Gothic by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PR830.T3 M45 2018ISBN: 0198824467Publication Date: 2018-12-25God and the Gothic: Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition provides a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution ofthe monasteries, now seen as usurping authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part one interpretseighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe's melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part two traces the origins of the doppelganger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employmentby a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In part three, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, whilein part four nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn membersexplore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restore the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.
Crisis of Doubt by Call Number: eBook & UI Main Library Stacks BR759 .L25 2006ISBN: 0199287872Publication Date: 2007-01-18The Victorian crisis of faith has dominated discussions of religion and the Victorians. Stories are frequently told of prominent Victorians such as George Eliot losing their faith. This crisis is presented as demonstrating the intellectual weakness of Christianity as it was assaulted by newlines of thought such as Darwinism and biblical criticism. This study serves as a corrective to that narrative. It focuses on freethinking and Secularist leaders who came to faith. As sceptics, they had imbibed all the latest ideas that seemed to undermine faith; nevertheless, they went on toexperience a crisis of doubt, and then to defend in their writings and lectures the intellectual cogency of Christianity. The Victorian crisis of doubt was surprisingly large. Telling this story serves to restore its true proportion and to reveal the intellectual strength of faith in the nineteenthcentury.
Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PR145 .K56 2015ISBN: 0814251986Publication Date: 2015-12-31In Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print, Joshua King demonstrates how nineteenth-century Britons turned to the printed page to imagine themselves in Christian communities spanning their nation. In contrast with traditional views of the nineteenth century, which regard the period as a turning point for religion from a public life to a privatized decline, Imagined Spiritual Communities argues that the rapid growth of print culture and a voluntary religious market inspired vigorous efforts to form virtual national congregations of readers. Focusing primarily on the work of Anglicans between the 1820s and 1890s, this study begins by freshly interpreting reading and educational programs promoted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frederick Denison Maurice, and Matthew Arnold. King then traces the emergence of John Keble's Christian Year as a catalyst for competing visions of a Christian nation united by private reading. He argues that this phenomenon illuminates the structure and reception of best-selling poetic cycles as diverse as Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam and Christina Rossetti's late Verses. Ultimately, Imagined Spiritual Communities reveals how dreams of print-mediated spiritual communion generated new poetic genres and rhetorical strategies, theories and theologies of media and reading, and ambitious schemes of education and church reform.
Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks PR868.C664 W47 2020ISBN: 0814214266Publication Date: 2020-06-01Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature explores the notion that missionaries, often perceived as only evangelically motivated in the British imperial project, were also spurred on by cosmopolitan ideals. Winter Jade Werner makes this surprising connection in order to write against standard understandings of missionary work as well as typical understandings of cosmopolitanism as a deeply secular project. Missionary Cosmopolitanism identifies the nineteenth-century novel as thematically and formally attuned to the tension between missionaries' cosmopolitan values and the moral impoverishment of their imperialist and expansionist practices. Werner's chapters interact with canonical works such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens's Bleak House, along with lesser-known works by Robert Southey and Sydney Owenson. Ultimately, Missionary Cosmopolitanism demonstrates that nineteenth-century literature both illustrated and helped define missionary discourses regarding cosmopolitan ideas, showing how global evangelicalism continues to tap into the "new cosmopolitanisms" of today.
The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry by Call Number: Cambridge Companions Complete CollectionISBN: 1316856542Publication Date: 2019-03-07The Victorian period has a strong tradition of poetry written by women. In this Companion, leading scholars deliver accessible and cutting-edge essays that situate Victorian women's poetry in its relation to print culture, diverse identities, and aesthetic and cultural issues. The book is inclusive in method, demonstrating, for example, the benefits of both distant and close reading approaches, and featuring major figures like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti and over one hundred poets altogether. Thematically arranged, the chapters deliver studies on a comprehensive array of subjects that address women's poetry in its manifold forms and investigate its global context. Essays shed light on children's poetry, domestic relations, sexualities, and stylistic artifice and conclude by looking at how women poets placed their published poems and how we can 'place' Victorian women poets today.
Faith in Poetry by ISBN: 1474234070Publication Date: 2017-11-16In this ambitious book, Michael D. Hurley explores how five great writers - William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot - engaged their religious faith in poetry, with a view to asking why they chose that literary form in the first place. What did they believe poetry could say or do that other kinds of language or expression could not? And how might poetry itself operate as a unique mode of believing? These deep questions meet at the crossroads of poetics and metaphysics, and the writers considered here offer different answers. But these writers also collectively shed light on the interplay between literature and theology across the long nineteenth century, at a time when the authority and practice of both was being fiercely reimagined.
Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion by Call Number: DOAB Directory of Open Access BooksISBN: 0814213979Publication Date: 2019-05-02Bringing together scholars from literary, historical, and religious studies,Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religioninterrogates the seemingly obvious category of "religion." This collection argues that any application of religion engages in complex and relatively modern historical processes. In considering the various ways that nineteenth-century religion was constructed, commodified, and practiced, contributors to this volume "speak" to each other, finding interdisciplinary links and resonances across a range of texts and contexts. The participle in its title--Constructing--acknowledges that any articulation of nineteenth-century religion is never just a work of the past: scholars also actively construct religion as their disciplinary assumptions (and indeed personal and lived investments) shape their research and findings. Constructing NineteenthCentury Religion newly analyzes the diverse ways in which religion was debated and deployed in a wide range of nineteenthcentury texts and contexts. While focusing primarily on nineteenthcentury Britain, the collection also contributes to the increasingly transnational and transcultural outlook of postsecular studies, drawing connections between Britain and the United States, continental Europe, and colonial India.
Tracy Fessenden's books, including Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State UP, 2018) and Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton UP, 2007; 2013); Tracy is co-editor of Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference (Columbia UP, 2013) and The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (Routledge, 2001); co-editor of the North American Religions series at New York University Press, the Religion Around series at Penn State University Press, and the journal Religion and American Culture for Cambridge University Press.
Secularism in Antebellum America by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BL2760 .M58 2011ISBN: 0226533239Publication Date: 2011-12-15Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern's pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York's penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism's emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism--in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear's erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.
Make Yourselves Gods by Call Number: UI Main Library Stacks BX8611 .C666 2019ISBN: 9780226474168Publication Date: 2019-11-14From the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged--socially, sexually, even racially--by the extravagances of belief they called "religion." Make Yourselves Gods offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century's end. Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Peter Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism--an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism.
Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel by Call Number: eBook & UI Main Library Stacks PN3503 .L39 2000ISBN: 0521661110Publication Date: 2000-04-24In Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, first published in 2000, Pericles Lewis shows how political debates over the sources and nature of 'national character' prompted radical experiments in narrative form amongst modernist writers. Though critics have accused the modern novel of shunning the external world, Lewis suggests that, far from abandoning nineteenth-century realists' concern with politics, the modernists used this emphasis on individual consciousness to address the distinctively political ways in which the modern nation-state shapes the psyche of its subjects. Tracing this theme through Joyce, Proust and Conrad, amongst others, Lewis claims that modern novelists gave life to a whole generation of narrators who forged new social realities in their own images. Their literary techniques - multiple narrators, transcriptions of consciousness, involuntary memory, and arcane symbolism - focused attention on the shaping of the individual by the nation and on the potential of the individual, in time of crisis, to redeem the nation.
Partial Faiths by Call Number: eBookISBN: 1282726161Publication Date: 2007-01-01Contents: Introduction: Postsecular projects -- Ontological pluralism and preterite spiritualities : Thomas Pynchon -- Worldly vocations : Don Delillo -- Enclosures, enchantments, and the art of discernment : Toni Morrison -- Narratives of turning in Native American fiction : N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich -- Neomonastic paths and the limits of postsecularism : Michael Ondaatje -- Epilogue: The dream of open dwelling.
Postmodern Belief by Call Number: eBook & UI Main Library Stacks PS225 .H86 2010ISBN: 1400834910Publication Date: 2010-07-01How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.
Outside the Fold by Call Number: eBook & UI Main Library Stacks BL639 .V57 1998ISBN: 1400843480Publication Date: 2021-05-11Outside the Fold is a radical reexamination of religious conversion. Gauri Viswanathan skillfully argues that conversion is an interpretive act that belongs in the realm of cultural criticism. To that end, this work examines key moments in colonial and postcolonial history to show how conversion questions the limitations of secular ideologies, particularly the discourse of rights central to both the British empire and the British nation-state. Implicit in such questioning is an attempt to construct an alternative epistemological and ethical foundation of national community. Viswanathan grounds her study in an examination of two simultaneous and, she asserts, linked events: the legal emancipation of religious minorities in England and the acculturation of colonial subjects to British rule. The author views these two apparently disparate events as part of a common pattern of national consolidation that produced the English state. She seeks to explain why resistance, in both cases, frequently took the form of religious conversion, especially to "minority" or alternative religions. Confronting the general characterization of conversion as assimilative and annihilating of identity, Viswanathan demonstrates that a willful change of religion can be seen instead as an act of opposition. Outside the Fold concludes that, as a form of cultural crossing, conversion comes to represent a vital release into difference. Through the figure of the convert, Viswanathan addresses the vexing question of the role of belief and minority discourse in modern society. She establishes new points of contact between the convert as religious dissenter and as colonial subject. This convergence provides a transcultural perspective not otherwise visible in literary and historical texts. It allows for radically new readings of significant figures as diverse as John Henry Newman, Pandita Ramabai, Annie Besant, and B. R. Ambedkar, as well as close studies of court cases, census reports, and popular English fiction. These varying texts illuminate the means by which discourses of religious identity are produced, contained, or opposed by the languages of law, reason, and classificatory knowledge. Outside the Fold is a challenging, provocative contribution to the multidisciplinary field of cultural studies.
