Rasmussen offers a novel interpretation of the relationship between religious concern and artistic creativity in the works of the self-styled "Christian poet and thinker" Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Although Kierkegaard articulated neither a "Christology" in the sense that the term has for systematic theology, nor a generic "theory of poetry" in the sense that phrase has for literary criticism, this study makes the case that Kierkegaard's writings nevertheless do advance a "Christomorphic poetics," a tertium quid that resists conventional distinctions between theology and literature. The term "Christomorphic" signals that Kierkegaard's Christian view of the incarnation of God in Christ shapes his poetics in a fundamental way and that, therefore, Kierkegaard's authorship and his incarnational view of God in Christ should be understood together. Arguing that Kierkegaard's poetics takes shape in conversation with many of the major themes of early German Romanticism (irony, imaginative creativity, paradox, the relativization of imitation [mimesis], and erotic love), this book offers a fresh appreciation of the depth of Kierkegaard's engagement with Romanticism, and of the contours of his alternative to that literary movement. Chapter one analyzes Kierkegaard's reception of romantic irony, and demonstrates that the romantic tendency to fantasize subjective existence (at least on Kierkegaard's reading) motivates the critique of romantic poetry in Kierkegaard's early works. Chapters two and three identify and explicate Kierkegaard's alternative to romantic poetics, elucidating his distinctive Christomorphic poetics in terms of his view of God as divine poet. The fourth chapter demonstrates the way Kierkegaard's emphasis on the "imitation of Christ" challenges the romantic relativization of "mimesis," and signals a reversal of the romantic celebration of the ironic imagination. Finally, chapter five constructs a typology of Kierkegaard's three senses of the term "poet." By showing how these different senses of the one term function within Kierkegaard's larger poetics, this chapter makes clear the manner in which Kierkegaard as a "religious poet" distinguishes himself from the "secular poet" of romantic irony by fostering what he considers authentic Christian "witness" in the world according to the "Word" of the divine poet embodied in Christ.

William James and the Transatlantic Conversation focuses on the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) and his engagements with European thought, together with the multidisciplinary reception of his work on both sides of the Atlantic since his death. James's encounters with European thinkers and ideas ran throughout his early life and across his distinguished international career, in which he participated in a number of transatlantic conversations in science, philosophy, psychology, religion, ethics, and literature. This volume explores and extends these conversations by drawing together twelve scholars from a range of disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic to assess James's work in all its variety, to trace his multidisciplinary reception across the twentieth century, and to evaluate his legacy in the twenty-first century. The first half of the book considers James's many intellectual influences and the second half focuses on A Pluralistic Universe (1909), the published text of his 1908 Hibbert Lectures at Oxford University, as a key text for assessing James's transatlantic conversations. The pluralistic transatlantic currents addressed in the first part of the volume enable a fuller understanding of James's philosophy of pluralism that forms the explicit focus for the second part. Taken as a collection, the volume is unique in scholarship on James in generating transatlantic, interdisciplinary, and cross-generational dialogues, and it repositions James as an important international thinker and arguably the most distinctive American intellectual figure of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.