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Re-thinking religion and literature in a series of chapters by
leading international scholars, "Reading the Abrahamic Faiths"
opens up a four-way dialogue between Jewish, Islamic, Christian and
Post-Secular literary traditions. The field of literary studies has
absorbed religion as another interdisciplinary mode of inquiry
without fully exploring the potential of their relationship to
explore material questions of culture, politics and globalization
as well as immaterial concerns such as faith, consciousness and
affect. In response, "Reading the Abrahamic Faiths" addresses
religion and literature from a number of global perspectives equip
to reflect on the material and immaterial through contemporary
theory and world politics. Each section - Judaism, Christianity,
Islam and Post-Secularism - is introduced by specialist to help
anchor the reader unfamiliar with these debates in the close
readings of the literary texts and traditions that follow.
Harold Godwineson was king of England from January 1066 until his
death at Hastings on 14th October of that year. Although he was not
the only candidate for the succession to the childless King Edward
the Confessor, Harold had a far stronger claim than William of
Normandy to the throne. For much of the reign of Edward the
Confessor, who was married to Harold's sister Edith, the Godwine
family, led by Earl Godwine, had dominated English politics. In The
House of Godwine Emma Mason tells the turbulent story of a
remarkable family which, until Harold's unexpected defeat, looked
far more likely than the dukes of Normandy to provide the long-term
rulers of England. But for the Norman conquest, an Anglo-Saxon
England ruled by the Godwine dynasty would have developed very
differntly from that dominated by the Normans.
William Wordsworth is the most influential of the Romantic poets,
and remains widely popular, even though his work is more complex
and more engaged with the political, social and religious upheavals
of his time than his reputation as a 'nature poet' might suggest.
Outlining a series of contexts - biographical, historical and
literary - as well as critical approaches to Wordsworth, this
Introduction offers students ways to understand and enjoy
Wordsworth's poetry and his role in the development of Romanticism
in Britain. Emma Mason offers a completely up-to-date summary of
criticism on Wordsworth from the Romantics to the present and an
annotated guide to further reading. With definitions of technical
terms and close readings of individual poems, Wordsworth's
experiments with form are fully explained. This concise book is the
ideal starting point for studying Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, and
the major poems as well as Wordsworth's lesser known writings.
The authors in this collection join an animated debate on the
persistence of Romanticism. Even as dominant twentieth-century
cultural movements have contested Romantic ""myths"" of redemptive
Nature, individualism, perfectibility, the transcendence of art,
and the heart's affections, the Romantic legacy survives as a point
of tension and of inspiration for modern writers. Rejecting the
Bloomian notion of anxious revisionism, ""The Monstrous Debt""
argues that various kinds of influences, inheritances, and
indebtedness exist between well-known twentieth-century authors and
canonical Romantic writers. Among the questions asked by this
volume are: How does Blake's graphic mythology submit to
""redemptive translations"" in the work of Dylan Thomas? How might
Ted Hughes' strong readings of a ""snaky"" Coleridge illuminate the
""mercurial"" poetic identity of Sylvia Plath? How does Shelley
""sustain"" the work of W. B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop with
supplies of ""imaginative oxygen""? In what ways does Keats enable
Bob Dylan to embrace influence? How does Keats prove inadequate for
Tony Harrison as he confronts contemporary violence? How does
""cockney"" Romanticism succeed in shocking John Betjeman's poetry
out of kitsch into something new and strange? ""The Monstrous
Debt"" seeks to broaden our sense of what ""influence"" is by
defining the complex of relations that contribute to the making of
the modern literary text. Scholars and students of the Romantic era
will enjoy this informative volume.
This rhetorical study of the persuasive practice of English Puritan
preachers and writers demonstrates how they appeal to both reason
and imagination in order to persuade their hearers and readers
towards conversion, assurance of salvation and godly living.
Examining works from a diverse range of preacher-writers such as
William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, Richard Baxter and John Bunyan,
this book maps out continuities and contrasts in the theory and
practice of persuasion. Tracing the emergence of Puritan allegory
as an alternative, imaginative mode of rhetoric, it sheds new light
on the paradoxical question of how allegories such as John Bunyan's
The Pilgrim's Progress came to be among the most significant
contributions of Puritanism to the English literary canon, despite
the suspicions of allegory and imagination that were endemic in
Puritan culture. Concluding with reflections on how Milton deploys
similar strategies to persuade his readers towards his
idiosyncratic brand of godly faith, this book makes an original
contribution to current scholarly conversations around the textual
culture of Puritanism, the history of rhetoric, and the rhetorical
character of theology.
This engaging volume provides readers with the essential criticism
on nineteenth-century poetry, organised around key areas of debate
in the field. The critical texts included in this volume reflect
both a traditional and modern emphasis on the study of poetry in
the long nineteenth century. These are then tied up by a newly
written essay summarising the ideas and encouraging further study
and debate. The book includes: sections on Periodization; 'What is
Poetry?'; Politics; Prosody; Forms; Emotion, feeling, affect;
Religion; Sexuality; and Science work by writers such as William
Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Christina Rossetti,
Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins critics and historians
including Isobel Armstrong, Richard Cronin, Jason Rudy, Joseph
Bristow and Gillian Beer Detailed introductions and critical
commentary by Francis O'Gorman, Rosie Miles, Stefano Evangelisto,
Natalie Hoffman, Martin Dubois, Gregory Tate Providing both the
essential criticism along with clear introductions and analysis,
this book is the perfect guide to students who wish to engage in
the exciting criticism and debates of nineteenth-century poetry.
In recent decades, reception history has become an increasingly
important and controversial topic of discussion in biblical
studies. Rather than attempting to recover the original meaning of
biblical texts, reception history focuses on exploring the history
of interpretation. In doing so it locates the dominant
historical-critical scholarly paradigm within the history of
interpretation, rather than over and above it. At the same time,
the breadth of material and hermeneutical issues that reception
history engages with questions any narrow understanding of the
history of the Bible and its effects on faith communities.
The challenge that reception history faces is to explore tradition
without either reducing its meaning to what faith communities think
is important, or merely offering anthologies of interesting
historical interpretations. This major new handbook addresses these
matters by presenting reception history as an enterprise (not a
method) that questions and understands tradition afresh.
The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible
consciously allows for the interplay of the traditional and the new
through a two-part structure. Part I comprises a set of essays
surveying the outline, form, and content of twelve key biblical
books that have been influential in the history of interpretation.
Part II offers a series of in-depth case studies of the
interpretation of particular key biblical passages or books with
due regard for the specificity of their social, cultural or
aesthetic context.
These case studies span two millennia of interpretation by readers
with widely differing perspectives. Some are at the level of a
group response (from Gnostic readings of Genesis, to Post-Holocaust
Jewish interpretations of Job); others examine individual
approaches to texts (such as Augustine and Pelagius on Romans, or
Gandhi on the Sermon on the Mount). Several chapters examine
historical moments, such as the 1860 debate over Genesis and
evolution, while others look to wider themes such as non-violence
or millenarianism. Further chapters study in detail the works of
popular figures who have used the Bible to provide inspiration for
their creativity, from Dante and Handel, to Bob Dylan and Dan
Brown.
Great literature is more often praised for compelling depictions of
conflict and tragedy than for moving portrayals of harmony and
well-being. This collection of verse brings together poems of
felicity, capturing what it means to be well in the fullest sense.
Presented in 14 thematic sections, these works offer inspiring
readings on wisdom, self-love, ecstasy, growth, righteousness, love
and lust, inspiration, oneness with nature, hope, irreverence, awe,
the delights of the senses, gratitude and compassion, relation to
the sacred, justice, and unity. At times elegant, at others blunt,
these poems reflect on what it means to live a rich, fulfilling
life.
Recent scholarship in nineteenth-century literary studies
consistently recognizes the profound importance of religion, even
as it marginalizes the topic. There are few, if any, challenging
yet manageable introductions to religion and literature in the
long-nineteenth century, a factor that serves to fuel scholars'
neglect of theological issues. This book aims to show how religion,
specifically Christianity, is integral to the literature and
culture of this period. It provides close readings of popular texts
and integrates these with accessible explanations of complex
religious ideas. Written by two scholars who have published widely
on religion and literature, the book offers a detailed grounding in
the main religious movements of the period 1750-1914. The dominant
traditions of High Anglicanism, Tractarianism, Evangelicalism, and
Roman Catholicism are contextualized by preceding chapters
addressing dissenting culture (primarily Presbyterianism,
Methodism, Unitarianism and Quakerism), and the question of
secularization is considered in the light of the diversity and
capacity for renewal within the Christian faith. Throughout the
book the authors untangle theological and church debates in a
manner that highlights the privileged relationship between religion
and literature in the period. The book also gives readers a
language to approach and articulate their own "religious" readings
of texts, texts that are often concerned with slippery subjects,
such as the divine, the non-material and the nature of religious
experience. Refusing to shut down religious debate by offering only
narrow or fixed definitions of Christian traditions, the book also
questions the demarcation of sacred materialfrom secular, as well
as connecting the vitality of religion in the period to a broader
literary culture.
The dynamics of medieval societies in England and beyond form the
focus of these essays on the Anglo-Norman world. Over the last
fifty years Ann Williams has transformed our understanding of
Anglo-Saxon and Norman society in her studies of personalities and
elites. In this collection, leading scholars in the field revisit
themes that have beencentral to her work, and open up new insights
into the workings of the multi-cultural communities of the realm of
England in the early Middle Ages. There are detailed discussions of
local and regional elites and the interplay between them that
fashioned the distinctive institutions of local government in the
pre-Conquest period; radical new readings of key events such as the
crisis of 1051 and a reassessment of the Bayeux Tapestry as the
beginnings of theHistoria Anglorum; studies of the impact of the
Norman Conquest and the survival of the English; and explorations
of the social, political, and administrative cultures in
post-Conquest England and Normandy. The individualessays are united
overall by the articulation of the local, regional, and national
identities that that shaped the societies of the period.
Contributors: S.D. Church, William Aird, Lucy Marten, Hirokazu
Tsurushima, Valentine Fallan, Judith Everard, Vanessa King, Pamela
Taylor, Charles Insley, Simon Keynes, Sally Harvey, K.S.B.
Keats-Rohan, David Bates, Emma Mason, David Roffe, Mark Hagger.
A richly valuable source of knowledge. MEDIUM AEVUM By the time of
the Conquest, the Normans had been established in Normandy for over
a hundred and fifty years. They had transformed themselves from
pagan Northmen into Christian princes; their territories extended
from England, southern Italy and Sicily to distant Antioch, and
their influence had spread throughout western Europe and the
Mediterranean. Duke William's victory at Hastings and the resulting
Anglo-Norman union brought England into the mainstreamof European
history and culture, with far-reaching consequences for Western
civilisation. These specially commissioned studies are concerned
with the achievements of the cross-Channel realm. They make a major
contribution toan understanding of the hundred years that witnessed
great change and major developments in English and Norman
government and society. There are surveys of the two constituent
parts, of Normandy under the Angevin kings, of the place of kingdom
and duchy in the politics and culture of the North Sea, and of the
parallel Norman achievement in the Mediterranean. There are
overviews both of secular administration and of the church, and a
study of "feudalism" and lordship. Within the broad field of
cultural history, there are discussions of language, literature,
the writing of history, and ecclesiastical architecture.
Contributors: LESLEY ABRAMS, MATTHEW BENNETT, MARJORIE CHIBNALL,
CHRISTOPHER HARPER-BILL, ELISABETH VAN HOUTS, EMMA MASON, RICHARD
PLANT, CASSANDRA POTTS, DANIEL POWER, IAN SHORT, ANN WILLIAMS
This engaging volume provides readers with the essential criticism
on nineteenth-century poetry, organised around key areas of debate
in the field. The critical texts included in this volume reflect
both a traditional and modern emphasis on the study of poetry in
the long nineteenth century. These are then tied up by a newly
written essay summarising the ideas and encouraging further study
and debate. The book includes: sections on Periodization; 'What is
Poetry?'; Politics; Prosody; Forms; Emotion, feeling, affect;
Religion; Sexuality; and Science work by writers such as William
Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Christina Rossetti,
Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins critics and historians
including Isobel Armstrong, Richard Cronin, Jason Rudy, Joseph
Bristow and Gillian Beer Detailed introductions and critical
commentary by Francis O'Gorman, Rosie Miles, Stefano Evangelisto,
Natalie Hoffman, Martin Dubois, Gregory Tate Providing both the
essential criticism along with clear introductions and analysis,
this book is the perfect guide to students who wish to engage in
the exciting criticism and debates of nineteenth-century poetry.
This new title outlines the lives and works of three popular and
influential women poets of the nineteenth century: Felicia Hemans,
Dora Greenwell and Adelaide Anne Procter. All three sought to forge
a Christian and emotive poetics in order to educate and sensitise
their readership, offering a gentle and benevolent reading
experience grounded in interpersonal feeling and religious love.
This study investigates both the radical potential and possible
limits of such a project, one inflected by the poets' relationships
to feeling and religion, whether dissenting, Anglican, Methodist,
Evangelical or Roman Catholic. The study also seeks to situate the
poets in their historical and aesthetic moment, examining their
diverse interest in figures such as Schiller, Coleridge, Germaine
de Stael and Dickens. Underlying all three poets' work, however, is
the profound influence of Wordsworth, figured by them as a literary
as well as spiritual guide anchoring their explorations of
religion, feeling and poetry.
Recent scholarship in nineteenth-century literary studies
consistently recognizes the profound importance of religion, even
as it marginalizes the topic. There are few, if any, challenging
yet manageable introductions to religion and literature in the
long-nineteenth century, a factor that serves to fuel scholars'
neglect of theological issues. This book aims to show how religion,
specifically Christianity, is integral to the literature and
culture of this period. It provides close readings of popular texts
and integrates these with accessible explanations of complex
religious ideas. Written by two scholars who have published widely
on religion and literature, the book offers a detailed grounding in
the main religious movements of the period 1750-1914. The dominant
traditions of High Anglicanism, Tractarianism, Evangelicalism, and
Roman Catholicism are contextualized by preceding chapters
addressing dissenting culture (primarily Presbyterianism,
Methodism, Unitarianism and Quakerism), and the question of
secularization is considered in the light of the diversity and
capacity for renewal within the Christian faith. Throughout the
book the authors untangle theological and church debates in a
manner that highlights the privileged relationship between religion
and literature in the period. The book also gives readers a
language to approach and articulate their own "religious" readings
of texts, texts that are often concerned with slippery subjects,
such as the divine, the non-material and the nature of religious
experience. Refusing to shut down religious debate by offering only
narrow or fixed definitions of Christian traditions, the book also
questions the demarcation of sacred materialfrom secular, as well
as connecting the vitality of religion in the period to a broader
literary culture.
Reviewing the first volume in this series, Christopher Allmand,
writing in English Historical Review, said: Once again, a volume of
papers published by the Boydell Press has made a useful
interdisciplinary contribution to an important and difficult
subject. Historians may read this book with profit.' But not only
historians, for the contributions to these volumes are
wide-ranging, and cover all aspects of culture in the middle ages,
with a strong emphasis on continental literature.
A series which is a model of its kind EDMUND KING, HISTORY The
contemporary historians of Anglo-Norman England form a particular
focus of this issue. There are contributions on Henry of
Huntingdon's representation of civil war; on the political intent
of the poems in the anonymous Life ofEdward the Confessor; on
William of Malmesbury's depiction of Henry I; and on the influence
upon historians of the late antique history attributed to
Hegesippus. A paper on Gerald of Wales and Merlin brings valuable
literary insights to bear. Other pieces tackle religious history
(northern monasteries during the Anarchy, the abbey of Tiron) and
politics (family history across the Conquest, the Norman brothers
Urse de Abetot and Robert Dispenser, the friendship network of King
Stephen's family). The volume begins with Judith Green's Allen
Brown Memorial Lecture, which provides a wide-ranging account of
kingship, lordsihp and community in eleventh-century England.
CONTRIBUTORS: Judith Green, Janet Burton, Catherine A.M. Clarke,
Sebastien Danielo, Emma Mason, Ad Putter, Kathleen Thompson, Jean
A. Truax, Elizabeth M. Tyler, Bjoern Weiler, Neil Wright
No single recent enterprise has done more to enlarge and deepen our
understanding of one of the most critical periods in English
history. ANTIQUARIES JOURNAL Anglo-Norman Studies, published
annually and containing the papers presented at the Battle
conference, is established as the single most important publication
in the field, covering not only matters relating to pre- and
post-Conquest England and France, but also the activities and
influences of the Normans on the wider European, Mediterranean, and
Middle Eastern stage; it celebrates its twenty-first anniversary
with this volume. This year there is an emphasis on the examination
of sources: translation-narratives, the Life of Hereward, the Book
of Llandaf, a Mont Saint Michel cartulary, Benoit de Sainte-Maure
and Roger of Howden. Secular topics include Anglo-Flemish relations
and the origins of an important family; ecclesiastical matters
considered are the Breton church in the late eleventh century,
William Rufus's monastic policy, the patrons of the great abbey of
Bec, and, for the first time in this series, the life of St Thomas
of Canterbury.
Detailed investigation into a transitional period of the Abbey's
history, covering the whole community. This book surveys the
monastic community at Westminster from the time when Edward the
Confessor [1042-1066] adopted it as his burial church down to the
end of the reign of king John. Originating according to legend
during the Roman occupation, the West Minster was converted from a
little collegiate church into a Benedictine monastery around 970.
However, the growth of its significance largely dates from its
massive endowment by king Edward, who commissioned a lavish
rebuilding of the abbey church, a focal point in his programme of
monarchical propaganda. Dr Mason covers every aspect of the abbey
community in detail examining the careers of the abbots and priors,
whilst ensuring that lesser figures are not neglected: monks;
craftsmen; lay servants; the personnel of the royal court who were
closely associated with the abbey. The author also considers the
community's dealings with the growing ecclesiastical bureaucracy;
the management of its properties, including its parochial churches;
and its relationship with other religious houses. Dr EMMA MASON
teaches in the Department of History, Birkbeck College.
Christina Rossetti (1830-94) is regarded as one of the greatest
Christian poets to write in English. While Rossetti has firmly
secured her place in the canon, her religious poetry was for a long
time either overlooked or considered evidence of a melancholic
disposition burdened by faith. Recent scholarship has redressed
reductive readings of Christian theology as repressive by
rethinking it as a form of compassionate politics. This shift has
enabled new readings of Rossetti's work, not simply as a body of
significant nineteenth-century devotional literature, but also as a
marker of religion's relevance to modern concerns through its
reflections on science and materialism, as well as spirituality and
mysticism. Emma Mason offers a compelling study of Christina
Rossetti, arguing that her poetry, diaries, letters, and devotional
commentaries are engaged with both contemporary theological debate
and an emergent ecological agenda. In chapters on the Catholic
Revival, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, contemporary debates on plant
and animal being, and the relationship between grace and
apocalypse, Mason reads Rossetti's theology as an argument for
spiritual materialism and ecological transformation. She ultimately
suggests that Rossetti's life and work captures the experience of
faith as one of loving intimacy with the minutiae of creation, a
divine body in which all things, material and immaterial, human and
nonhuman, divine and embodied, are interconnected.
In recent decades, reception history has become an increasingly
important and controversial topic of discussion in biblical
studies. Rather than attempting to recover the original meaning of
biblical texts, reception history focuses on exploring the history
of interpretation. In doing so it locates the dominant
historical-critical scholarly paradigm within the history of
interpretation, rather than over and above it. At the same time,
the breadth of material and hermeneutical issues that reception
history engages with questions any narrow understanding of the
history of the Bible and its effects on faith communities. The
challenge that reception history faces is to explore tradition
without either reducing its meaning to what faith communities think
is important, or merely offering anthologies of interesting
historical interpretations. This major new handbook addresses these
matters by presenting reception history as an enterprise (not a
method) that questions and understands tradition afresh. The Oxford
Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible consciously allows
for the interplay of the traditional and the new through a two-part
structure. Part I comprises a set of essays surveying the outline,
form, and content of twelve key biblical books that have been
influential in the history of interpretation. Part II offers a
series of in-depth case studies of the interpretation of particular
key biblical passages or books with due regard for the specificity
of their social, cultural or aesthetic context. These case studies
span two millennia of interpretation by readers with widely
differing perspectives. Some are at the level of a group response
(from Gnostic readings of Genesis, to Post-Holocaust Jewish
interpretations of Job); others examine individual approaches to
texts (such as Augustine and Pelagius on Romans, or Gandhi on the
Sermon on the Mount). Several chapters examine historical moments,
such as the 1860 debate over Genesis and evolution, while others
look to wider themes such as non-violence or millenarianism.
Further chapters study in detail the works of popular figures who
have used the Bible to provide inspiration for their creativity,
from Dante and Handel, to Bob Dylan and Dan Brown.
Rethinking religion and literature in a series of chapters by
leading international scholars, Reading the Abrahamic Faiths opens
up a dialogue between Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Post-Secular
literary cultures. Literary studies has absorbed religion as
another interdisciplinary mode of inquiry without always attending
to its multifacted potential to question ideologically neutral
readings of culture, belief, emotion, politics and inequality. In
response, Reading the Abrahamic Faiths contributes to a
reevaluation of the nexus between religion and literature that is
socially, affectively and materially determined in its sensitivity
to the expression of belief. Each section - Judaism, Christianity,
Islam and Post-Secularism - is introduced by a specialist in these
respective areas to introduce the critical readings of the texts
and discourses that follow.
This title illuminates the importance of the inter-relationship
between emotion and religion in women's poetry of the Romantic and
Victorian eras.
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