Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-century Thought (Oxford English Monographs)
by Nicholas Hudson
An analysis of Johnson's relationship with the ethics and theology of the eighteenth century, examining the background to his views on a wide range of issues debated by the philosophers and divines of his age. The author emphasizes the ambivalence and contradiction inherent in the orthodoxy which Johnson espoused and challenges the assumption that Johnson's religious beliefs were unstable and filled with anxiety. He gained strength from the belief that he upheld an eminent tradition in Christian...
Precarious Identities (Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge)
This book investigates the construction of identity and the precarity of the self in the work of the Calvinist Fulke Greville (1554–1628) and the Jesuit Robert Southwell (1561–1595). For the first time, a collection of original essays unites them with the aim to explore their literary production. The essays collected here define these authors’ efforts to forge themselves as literary, religious, and political subjects amid a shifting politico-religious landscape. They highlight the authors’ criti...
Postsecular Poetics (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures)
by Rebekah Cumpsty
This book is the first full-length study of the postsecular in African literatures. Religion, secularism, and the intricate negotiations between the two, codified in recent criticism as postsecularism, are fundamental conditions of globalized modernity. These concerns have been addressed in social science disciplines, but they have largely been neglected in postcolonial and literary studies. To remedy this oversight, this monograph draws together four areas of study: it brings debates in religio...
Essays on Religious Themes in Speculative Fiction Texts
by Elise West, Bailey Leander-Vanoers, and Rachel West
The Book of Esther and the Typology of Female Transfiguration in American Literature
by Ariel Clark Silver
The enduring search for female salvation in American literature is first expressed through typology, an interpretive framework that pairs type with antitype, historical scriptural promise with future spiritual fulfillment. When Cotton Mather invokes the typos of Esther in Ornaments of the Daughters of Zion, a Puritan conduct book, he offers a female type of divine wisdom, authority and force. In the biblical Book of Esther, Esther acts as a female type of wisdom and redemption, but her story a...
Cyborg Saints (Children's Literature and Culture)
by Carissa Turner Smith
Saints are currently undergoing a resurrection in middle grade and young adult fiction, as recent prominent novels by Socorro Acioli, Julie Berry, Adam Gidwitz, Rachel Hartman, Merrie Haskell, Gene Luen Yang, and others demonstrate. Cyborg Saints: Religion and Posthumanism in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction makes the radical claim that these holy medieval figures are actually the new cyborgs in that they dethrone the autonomous subject of humanist modernity. While young people navigate poli...
An exploration of the temporal function that "the Jew" plays in literature. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines how the Hebraic myth, in which Jewishness became a metaphor for an ancient, pre-Christian past, was reimagined in nineteenth-century American realism. The Hebraic myth, while integral to a Protestant understanding of time, was incapable of addressing modern Jewishness, especially in the context of the growing social and national c...
Michael Caputo, through years of exhaustive research, has discovered letters, writings, and quotes that reveal what the greatest artists, musicians, philosophers, scientists, and writers thought about the God of heaven. Through the pages of this timeless work, you will engage the thoughts of history's most celebrated people: Mozart, Galileo, Descartes, Shakespeare, Einstein, Michelangelo, and many more. Did great intellect and creativity lead brilliant men and women of the past to agnosticism a...
This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about an imminent spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the res...
The soul, which dominated many intellectual debates at the beginning of the twentieth century, has virtually disappeared from the sciences and the humanities. Yet it is everywhere in popular culture—from holistic therapies and new spiritual practices to literature and film to ecological and political ideologies. Ignored by scholars, it is hiding in plain sight in a plethora of religious, psychological, environmental, and scientific movements. This book uncovers the history of the concept of the...
The first one-volume reader of the best of G. K. Chesterton’s writing in the full range of genres he mastered. Chesterton was a towering literary figure of the early twentieth century, accomplished and prolific in many literary forms. A forceful proponent of Christianity and a critic of both conservatism and liberalism, he set out to describe nothing less than the spiritual journey of humanity in Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, his most enduring books. He is famous as well for his beloved Fa...
World-renowned critic and scholar Northrop Frye examines the Bible as the single most important influence in the imaginative tradition of Western art and literature. Frye rejects both the dogmatic and literal interpretations while celebrating the uniqueness of the Bible as distinct from all other epics and sacred texts. His highly original analysis shows the Bible as redeeming history with a visionary poetic perspective that complements science in the understanding of man’s nature.
Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution argues that Methodism in the eighteenth century was a media event that uniquely combined and utilized different types of media to reach a vast and diverse audience. Specifically, it traces particular cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth century, from the rise of the novel through the Revolution controversy of the 1790s to the sh...
American Religious Poems: An Anthology by Harold Bloom
by Harold Bloom
No more profound and intimate expression of America's spiritual life can be found than the work of its poets. From Anne Bradstreet to the Beats, from Native American chant and Shaker hymnody to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, religion and spirituality have always been central to American poetry. In this unique anthology, world-renowned scholar Harold Bloom weaves a tapestry from the many strands of American religious experience and practice: the searching meditations of Puritan pioneers, the e...
This book examines the constructions and representations of male and female Sikhs in Indian and diasporic literature and culture through the consideration of the role of violence as constitutive of Sikh identity. How do Sikh men and women construct empowering identities within the Indian nation-state and in the diaspora? The book explores Indian literature and culture to understand the role of violence and the feminization of baptized and turbaned Sikh men, as well as identity formation of Sikh...
2017 Logos Bookstore Association Award for Christianity/Culture2017 Dallas Willard Center Book Award FinalistForeword INDIES 2016 Book of the Year Awards FinalistWorld Magazine's Best Books of 2016 Short List2016 Aldersgate Prize by the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan UniversityEvangelical Christian Publishers Association Top Shelf Book Cover Award14th Annual Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year, Counseling and Relationships Shusaku Endo's novel Silence, first published in 1966,...
Routledge Revivals: The Song Celestial or Bhagavad-Gita (1906) (Routledge Revivals)
First published in 1909, this book presents an English translation of chapters 25-42 of the Bhishma Parva from the epic Sanskrit poem Mahabharata — better known as the Bhagavad-Gita, reckoned as one of the "Five Jewels" of Devanagari literature. The plot consists of a dialogue between Prince Arjuna and Krishna, the Supreme Deity, in a war-chariot prior to a great battle. The conversation that takes place unfolds a philosophical system which remains the prevailing Brahmanic belief, blending the d...