In this ground-breaking book, Alison Milbank explains why a comprehension of the Victorian reception of Dante is essential for a full understanding of Victorianism as a whole. Her focus on this much-neglected topic allows her to reconfigure the British nineteenth-century understanding of history, nationalism, aesthetics and gender, and their often strange intersections. The account also builds towards a demonstration that the modernist perpetuation of the Dante obsession reveals an equal continuity with many aspects of Victorianism. The book provides not only an authoritative introduction to these important cultural themes, but also a re-reading of the genealogy of literature in the modern period. Instead of the Victorian realism challenged by Modernist symbolism's attempts to transcend linear time, Milbank offers us a contrary, continuous 'Danteism'. For both the Victorians and the Modernists Dante is the first writer to historicise, fictionalise and humanise the eternal role, and he becomes paradoxically the means by which history, secularised fiction and a positivist humanism could be reconnected to a lost transcendent. Dante and the Victorians provides the first comprehensive account of why the reading of Dante was central to nineteenth-century British language and culture. -- .

God 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 of the 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 interprets eighteenth-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 employment by 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, while in 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 members explore 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.

This volume deploys theology in a reconstructive approach to contemporary literary criticism, to validate and exemplify theological readings of literary texts as a creative exercise. It engages in a dialogue with interdisciplinary approaches to literature in which theology is alert and responsive to the challenges following postmodernism and postmodern literary criticism. It demonstrates the scope and explanatory power of theological readings across various texts and literary genres. Theology and Literature after Postmodernity explores a reconstructive approach to reading and literary study in the university setting, with contributions from interdisciplinary scholars worldwide.

Few other books have caused as much stir in the Church of England in recent decades as has For the Parish. Twelve years on from its publication, in the wake of the Covid pandemic and the ‘Save the Parish’ movement much has changed, but much has stayed the same. In this follow up to this influential and controversial book, new and already familiar themes are newly inflected in the debates of the present time: principally minster hubs, the ‘Emerging Church’ programme and the Strategic Development Fund. Alison Milbank challenges the ecclesiology, models of theological anthropology and the analysis of secularism that are present (explicitly or implicitly) in these movements, and offer a striking and encouraging vision of what the parish model could offer to our anxious world.

In A Sicilian Romance (1790) Radcliffe began to forge the unique mixture of the psychology of terror and poetic description that would make her the great exemplar of the Gothic nove, and the idol of the Romantics. This early novel explores the cavernous landscapes and labyrinthine passages of Sicily's castles and covents to reveal the shameful secrets of its all-powerful aristocracy. Julia and Emilia Mazzini live secluded in an ancient mansion near the Straits of Messina. After their father's return to the island a neglected part of the house is haunted by a series of mysterious sights and sounds. The origin of these hauntings is only discovered after a series of breathless pursuits through dreamlike pastoral landscapes. When revelation finally comes, it forces the heroines to challenge the united forces of religious and patriarchal authority. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Fresh Expressions of Church are most significant development in the Church of England in recent decades. Many have called for a thorough theological engagement with the movement. The Church of England is engaging in radical new departures when the ecclesiological thinking for such experiments is far from complete. Parishes are the mainstay of the 'inherited church'. Frequently they are belittled and cast as either unhelpful or irrelevant. The authors argue for the vitality of the parish, both for mission and for discipleship. The authors argue that the forms of the church are to be an embodiment of her faith. They should therefore be more determined by our theological traditions than by the surrounding culture. They show that the traditions of the parish church represent ways in which time, space, community are ordered in relation to God and the gospel.

God's Church in the World: The Gift of Catholic Mission presents a confident and joyful assertion of the Catholic character of Christian mission and its sacramental nature, exploring the transforming role the Catholic tradition can play in evangelism. A range of outstanding contributors explore the gifts that the Catholic tradition - formed by a conviction that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist intensifies and motivates an awareness of the sacramental presence of Christ in the world - can bring to the church's engagement with the world. Chapters include: * Mission and the Life of Prayer * Mission and the Sacraments * Catholic Mission in Practice * The Virgin Mary and Mission * Vocation and Mission * The Sacraments as Converting Ordinances * Social Justice and Growth in Anglo-Catholic Churches * Reflections on Scripture and Catholic Mission * Catholic Mission: Historical Perspectives The contributors represent the breadth of Catholic traditions and identities in the Church of England today.

Since its beginning in the 1990s, Radical Orthodoxy has become perhaps the most influential, and certainly the most controversial, movement in contemporary theology. This book offers an introduction to the Radical Orthodox sensibility through sermons preached by some of those most prominent figures in radical orthodoxy. Accessible, challenging and varied, the sermons together help to suggest what Radical Orthodoxy might mean in practice. Contributors include Andrew Davison, John Milbank, John Inge, Catherine Pickstock, Martin Warner, Graham Ward and Stanley Hauerwas

This volume deploys theology in a reconstructive approach to contemporary literary criticism, to validate and exemplify theological readings of literary texts as a creative exercise. It engages in a dialogue with interdisciplinary approaches to literature in which theology is alert and responsive to the challenges following postmodernism and postmodern literary criticism. It demonstrates the scope and explanatory power of theological readings across various texts and literary genres. Theology and Literature after Postmodernity explores a reconstructive approach to reading and literary study in the university setting, with contributions from interdisciplinary scholars worldwide.

This book takes Chesterton's 'natural theology' through fairytales seriously as a theological project appropriate to an intellectual attempt to return to faith in a secular age. It argues that Tolkien's fiction makes sense also as the work of a Catholic writer steeped in Chestertonian ideas and sharing his literary-theological poetics. While much writing on religious fantasy moves quickly to talk about wonder, Milbank shows that this has to be hard won and that Chesterton is more akin to the modernist writers of the early twentieth-century who felt quite dislocated from the past. His favoured tropes of paradox, defamiliarization and the grotesque have much in common with writers like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce and their use of the demotic as well as the 'mythic method'. Using Chesterton's literary rhetoric as a frame, the book sets out to chart a redemptive poetics that first decentres the reader from his habitual perception of the world, then dramatizes his self-alienation through the grotesque, before finding in that very alienation a sort of pharmakon through paradox and an embrace of difference. The next step is to change one's vision of the world beyond the self through magic which, paradoxically, is the means by which one can reconnect with the physical world and remove the fetishism and commodification of the object. Chesterton's theology of gift is the means in which this magic becomes real and people and things enter into reciprocal relations that reconnect them with the divine.