Through a Glass Darkly
Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory
Herausgeber: Nelson, Holly Faith; Zimmermann, Jens; Szabo, Lynn R
Through a Glass Darkly
Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory
Herausgeber: Nelson, Holly Faith; Zimmermann, Jens; Szabo, Lynn R
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Consolation in Un/certainty: The Sacred Spaces of Suffering in the Children's Fantasy Literature of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and Madeleine L'Engle Monika B. Hilder Monika Hilder contends that the "mythic imagination" of MacDonald, Lewis, and L'Engle works alchemically inasmuch as it "transforms suffering into a genuinely sacred space of well-being," one that encourages children to exchange an "idolatry of certainty" for the "defiant hope" of "consolation in un/certainty" (p. 240).
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Consolation in Un/certainty: The Sacred Spaces of Suffering in the Children's Fantasy Literature of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and Madeleine L'Engle Monika B. Hilder Monika Hilder contends that the "mythic imagination" of MacDonald, Lewis, and L'Engle works alchemically inasmuch as it "transforms suffering into a genuinely sacred space of well-being," one that encourages children to exchange an "idolatry of certainty" for the "defiant hope" of "consolation in un/certainty" (p. 240).
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Produktdetails
- Produktdetails
- Verlag: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Seitenzahl: 480
- Erscheinungstermin: 9. Juni 2010
- Englisch
- Abmessung: 226mm x 152mm x 30mm
- Gewicht: 680g
- ISBN-13: 9781554583058
- ISBN-10: 1554583055
- Artikelnr.: 33659150
- Verlag: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Seitenzahl: 480
- Erscheinungstermin: 9. Juni 2010
- Englisch
- Abmessung: 226mm x 152mm x 30mm
- Gewicht: 680g
- ISBN-13: 9781554583058
- ISBN-10: 1554583055
- Artikelnr.: 33659150
Table of Contents for Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and
the Sublime in Literature and Theory, edited by Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R.
Szabo, and Jens Zimmermann
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Trauma and Transcendence: An Introduction Holly Faith Nelson
The Classical and Biblical Inheritance
Sacred Proposals and the Spiritual Sublime David Lyle Jeffrey
Medieval Visions and Dreams
"Loke in: How weet a wounde is here!": The Wounds of Christ as a Sacred
Space in English Devotional Literature Eleanor McCullough
Suffering in the Service of Venus: The Sacred, the Sublime, and Chaucerian
Joy in the Middle Part of the Parliament of Fowls Norm Klassen
Shakespearean Horror
Listening to Lavinia: Emmanuel Levinas's Saying and Said in Titus
Andronicus Sean Lawrence
Precious Stories: The Discursive Economy in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece
Heather G.S. Johnson
Metaphysical Afflictions
The Sacred Pain of Penitence: The Theology of John Donne's Holy Sonnets
David Anonby
Bearing the Cross: The Christian's Response to Suffering in Herbert's The
Temple Daniel W. Doerksen
The Ethical Romantic Sublime
Horrific Suffering, Sacred Terror, and Sublime Freedom in Helen Maria
Williams's Peru Natasha Duquette
Joanna Baillie and the Christian Gothic: Reforming Society through the
Sublime Christine A. Colón
Suffering and Sacrament in the Nineteenth Century
Sacramental Suffering and the Waters of Redemption and Transformation in
George Eliot's Fiction Constance M. Fulmer
Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Tractarian Suffering Esther T. Hu
Suffering in Word and in Truth: Seventeenth and Nineteenth Century Quaker
Women's Autobiography Robynne Rogers Healey
Sacred Modernism(s)
Sacramental Imagination: Eucharists of the Ordinary Universe in the Works
of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf Richard Kearney
The Via Negativa in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India George Piggford
The Fellowship of Suffering and Hope in Fantasy Literature
Consolation in Un/certainty: The Sacred Spaces of Suffering in the
Children's Fantasy Literature of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and
Madeleine L'Engle Monika Hilder
The Messiah of History: The Search for Synchronicity in Miller's A Canticle
for Leibowitz Deanna T. Smid
Violation and Redemption in Canadian Fiction
Suffering and the Sacred: Hugh Hood's The New Age / Le nouveau siécle
Barbara Pell
Fictional Violations in Alice Munro's Narratives John C. Van Rys
The American Sublime
Thomas Merton and the Aesthetics of the Sublime: A Beautiful Terror Lynn
R. Szabo
Belated Beloved: Time, Trauma, and the Sublime in Toni Morrison's Beloved
Steve Vine
Annie Dillard on Holy Ground: The Artist as Nun in the Postmodern Sublime
Deborah Bowen
Japanese (Re)Visioning of the Suffering Christ
Passion Plays by Proxy: The Paschal Face as Interculturality in Endô
Shûsaku and Mishima Yukio Sean Somers
Postmodern Aesthetics and Beyond
Testifying to the Infinity of the Other: The Sacred and Ethical Dimensions
of Secondary Witnessing in Anne Karpf's The War After Bettina Stumm
Sacred Space and the Fellowship of Suffering in the Postmodern Sublime
Richard J. Lane
Suffering Divine Things: Cruciform Reasoning or Incarnational Hermeneutics
Jens Zimmermann
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
Contributors
David Anonby is a lecturer in English at Trinity Western University. His
research areas are early modern devotional literature and religion and
literature. He is currently working on the theology of John Donne, an
interest that developed during graduate studies at the University of
British Columbia under Paul Stanwood. Other areas of interest include the
Bible as literature, Shakespeare, and the relationship between sexuality
and spirituality.
Christine A. Colón is an associate professor of English at Wheaton College
in Illinois, where she teaches courses in writing, English literature,
global literature, modern drama, and Jane Austen. She has published
articles on Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Anne Brontë, Adelaide Procter,
Caryl Churchill, Wilkie Collins, and John Keats. She is the author of the
introduction to the Valancourt edition of Joanna Baillie's Gothic dramas,
and she has recently published a monograph entitled Joanna Baillie and the
Art of Moral Influence.
Daniel W. Doerksen is Honorary Research Professor, Department of English,
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Originally from Winnipeg, he
received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1973. He
has published Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English
Church before Laud (1997) and co-edited with Christopher Hodgkins Centered
on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way (2004).
His book manuscript "Picturing Conflicts: Herbert, Calvin, and Scriptural
Portrayals of Experience" is currently under review. He has authored
articles on Spenser, Donne, Herbert, and Milton. Recent work includes
"'Generous Ambiguity' Revisited: A Herbert for All Seasons" (George Herbert
Journal 30.1-2 (2006-2007): 19-41) and "George Herbert, Calvinism, and
Reading 'Mattens,'" forthcoming in Christianity and Literature.
Natasha Duquette teaches eighteenth-century literature and critical theory
at Biola University in Southern California. She has published articles in
Mosaic, Notes and Queries, Christianity and Literature, and
Persuasions-Online. She has also edited the essay collection Sublimer
Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology (2007) and
recently contributed to Jane Austen Sings the Blues (2009). She is
currently producing a new, annotated edition of Helen Maria William's novel
Julia for Pickering & Chatto's Chawton House Library series.
Constance M. Fulmer holds the Blanche E. Seaver Chair in English Literature
and is the associate dean of Seaver College at Pepperdine University in
Malibu, California. She is working on a biography of Edith J. Simcox and a
book on George Eliot's moral aesthetic. She has published an annotated
bibliography of George Eliot criticism (1977) and with Margaret Barfield
edited A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox's
Autobiography of a Shirtmaker (1998) as well as several articles on George
Eliot and Edith Simcox. She is president of the Victorian Interdisciplinary
Studies Association of the Western United States.
Robynne Rogers Healey is an associate professor of history at Trinity
Western University in Langley, British Columbia. She is the author of From
Quaker to Upper Canadian: Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends,
1801-1850 (2006). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Quaker
History, the Canadian Quaker History Journal, the York Pioneer, and Past
Imperfect, and her essay on the diary of Sarah Welch Hill is included in
The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996
(2002).
Monika B. Hilder is an associate professor of English at Trinity Western
University. She specializes in children's literature and fantasy
literature, and her research interests include literature as moral
education, imaginative education, gender criticism, and literature and
spirituality, with a focus on George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine
L'Engle, and L.M. Montgomery. Recent publications include journal articles
and book chapters on C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, L.M. Montgomery, and
moral education.
Esther T. Hu, who received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, teaches
literature and writing at Boston University. Her publications include
"Christina Rossetti, John Keble, and the Divine Gaze" in Victorian Poetry
(2008) and a translation, "Mother Goose Got Married," in Taiwan Literature:
English Translation Series (2007). She is writing a book on Christina
Rossetti's religious poetry and has completed the translation of Heaven and
Earth: The Love Story of General Hu Tsung-Nan and Dr. Hsia-Ti Yeh into
English.
David Lyle Jeffrey, Ph.D. (Princeton) and Fellow of the Royal Society of
Canada, is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor
University. He is also Professor Emeritus of English literature at the
University of Ottawa, and has been Guest Professor at Peking University
(Beijing) since 1996 and Honorary Professor at the University of
International Business and Economics (Beijing) since 2005. His books
include A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992);
The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (1975); Chaucer and
Scriptural Tradition (1984); English Spirituality in the Age of Wesley
(1987, 1994, 2000); The Law of Love: English Spirituality in the Age of
Wyclif (1988, 2001); People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary
Culture (1996); and a co-authored book on The Bible and the University
(2007). Currently he has forthcoming a book on Christianity and literature,
co-authored by Greg Maillet (2010), and chapters for the Cambridge History
of Literary Criticism and Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible, and he
is completing a commentary on Luke for the Brazos theological commentary
series.
Heather G.S. Johnson received her Ph.D. in Renaissance English literature
from Indiana University Bloomington and is currently teaching at Southern
Illinois University Edwardsville. Her current research explores
seventeenth-century attitudes toward texts and textuality.
Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston
College. His publications include Poétique du Possible (1984); Dialogues
With Contemporary Continental Thinkers (1984); Modern Movements in European
Philosophy (1987); Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (1987);
The Wake of the Imagination (1988); Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post
Modern (1991,1998); Angel of Patrick's Hill (1991); Visions of Europe
(1993); Poetics of Modernity (1995); States of Mind: Dialogues with
Contemporary Thinkers (1995); Sam's Fall (1995); Walking at Sea Level
(1997); Desiderio et Dio (1996); The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of
Religion (2001); On Stories: Thinking in Action (2001); Strangers, Gods,
and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (2002); Debates in Continental
Philosophy: Richard Kearney in Conversation with Contemporary Thinkers
(2004); The Owl of Minerva: Encountering Paul Ricoeur (2004); and
Navigations: Collected Irish Essays, 1976-2006 (2006).
Norm Klassen is an associate professor and the current chair of English at
St. Jerome's University, federated with the University of Waterloo. He is
the author of Chaucer on Love, Knowledge, and Sight (1995) and co-author of
The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of
University Education (2006). Recent publications include notes and articles
in Notes and Queries and Quaderni d'Italianistica as well as book chapters
in A Concise Companion to Chaucer (2005), The Strategic Smorgasbord of
Postmodernity: Literature and the Christian Critic (2007), and Tradition
and Formation: Claiming an Inheritance (2009).
Richard J. Lane teaches in the English Department at Vancouver Island
University, where he also directs the Literary Theory Research Group and
the Seminar for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He is the author or
editor of nine academic books, including Image Technologies in Canadian
Literature (2009), the single-authored Fifty Key Literary Theorists (2006),
The Postcolonial Novel (2005), and Reading Walter Benjamin: Writing through
the Catastrophe (2005). His Jean Baudrillard (2000, second expanded edition
2009) has been translated into Japanese and Korean. Lane writes the
"Canada" section of The Year's Work in English Studies for Oxford
University Press and The English Association.
Sean Lawrence is an assistant professor in the Department of Critical
Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). He has published
on Elizabethan drama in journals such as the European Journal of English
Studies, English Studies in Canada, and Renascence: Essays on Values in
Literature. He is currently completing a book project entitled Forgiving
the Gift: Exchange and Forgiveness in Marlowe and Shakespeare.
Eleanor McCullough, a graduate of the University of Oxford and Regent
College, is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the
University of York, England. Her current research involves investigating
the ways in which late-medieval laypeople accessed the liturgy through
vernacular lyrics and prayers in English and Anglo-Norman. She was recently
granted a fellowship by the church of All Saints North Street to
reconstruct a medieval mass for the Use of York, which was performed and
published in 2009. McCullough lectures on medieval literature and theology
in the Oxford Scholars and Christians in Residence summer program.
Holly Faith Nelson, an associate professor of English and co-director of
the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University, has co-edited
The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose (2000); Of
Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton (2005); Eikon
Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes (2006); and James Hogg and the
Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author
(2009). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Studies in English
Literature, Studies in Philology, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Scintilla,
Studies in Hogg and his World, and The Year's Work in English Studies.
Barbara Pell was a much loved and admired professor of English at Trinity
Western University. She taught at Trinity for nearly twenty years before
her death on March 9, 2009. Her publications include two monographs-Faith
and Fiction: A Theological Critique of the Narrative Strategies of Hugh
MacLennan and Morley Callaghan (1998) and A Portrait of the Artist: Ernest
Buckler's "The Mountain and the Valley" (1995)-as well as numerous articles
and book chapters on Canadian literature. She was the recipient of the
Davis Distinguished Teaching Award in 2006 and a Leading Women Award in
2008.
George Piggford is an associate professor of English and Martin Fellow in
Catholic Studies at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. He compiled
and edited Forster's The Feminine Note in Literature (2000) and is
co-editor of Queer Forster (1997). He has published on modernism and
postmodernism in journals including English Studies in Canada, Modern
Drama, and Mosaic, and in the collections American Gothic (1998), American
Modernism across the Arts (1999), and The Strategic Smorgasbord of
Postmodernity (2008). He is currently at work on a project on Flannery
O'Connor and the languages of mysticism.
Deanna T. Smid is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Her
dissertation, "'The world in man's heart': The Faculty of Imagination in
Early Modern English Literature", supervised by Mary Silcox, explores early
modern perceptions of imagination as a medical, philosophical, and
psychological construct which is then used and stimulated in works of
literature. Studying imagination is one of the consequences of her interest
in science fiction and in proto-scientific literary works. Her research
interests also include devotional poetry and English emblem books.
Sean Somers teaches in the English Department at the University of British
Columbia. He has published several articles and book chapters on
translation theory and the intercultural connections between Japan and
Europe in the twentieth century. His monograph Ancestral Recall: The Celtic
Revival and Japanese Modernism is currently under review.
Bettina Stumm is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia,
Canada. Her work examines the intersections between ethics and
collaborative autobiography and develops an ethical framework for secondary
witnessing in trauma communities. She recently assisted in writing the
Holocaust memoir, A Long Labour, with survivor Rhodea Shandler and is
currently the reviews editor for Life Writing.
Lynn R. Szabo is an associate professor of English at Trinity Western
University where she teaches American literature and creative writing. She
is a scholar of the poet and mystic Thomas Merton and is the editor of the
first comprehensive edition of Merton's poetry, In the Dark before Dawn:
New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton (2005). She has written primarily on
poetics and language, particularly on their relationship to silence and
solitude in the American literary tradition.
John Van Rys, a graduate of Dalhousie, is a professor of English at
Redeemer University College. He has written on a range of modern Canadian
writers, including Al Purdy, Margaret Avison, Ernest Buckler, Robertson
Davies, and Alice Munro, as well as on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. His
current research focuses on cross-border writing, such as the fiction of
Guy Vanderhaeghe and Annie Proulx; on the Canadian historical novel,
particularly on suffering and trauma; and on the complexities of Munro's
short stories, including their historical dimensions, their moral
complexity, and their formal openness. He has also co-authored The Research
Writer: Curiosity, Discovery, Dialogue (forthcoming).
Steve Vine is a senior lecturer in English at Swansea University, Wales,
where he specializes in teaching Romantic literature and literary theory.
As well as articles and book chapters on Romanticism and theory, his
publications include Blake's Poetry: Spectral Visions (1993), the Penguin
edition of D.H. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod (1995), Emily Brontë (1998),
Literature in Psychoanalysis: A Reader (2005), and William Blake (2007). He
is currently writing a book entitled Reinventing the Sublime: Post-Romantic
Literature and Theory.
Jens Zimmermann is a professor of English and Canada Research Chair in
Religion, Interpretation, and Culture at Trinity Western University. He is
the author of Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An
Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation (2004) and Theologische
Hermeneutik (2008); co-author of The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational
Humanism and the Future of University Education (2006); and co-editor of
Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy (2009). His
articles have appeared in journals such as Christianity and Literature, the
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, the Journal of Beliefs
and Values: Studies in Religion and Education, the Journal for Hermeneutics
and Postmodern Thought, and Philosophy Today.
the Sublime in Literature and Theory, edited by Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R.
Szabo, and Jens Zimmermann
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Trauma and Transcendence: An Introduction Holly Faith Nelson
The Classical and Biblical Inheritance
Sacred Proposals and the Spiritual Sublime David Lyle Jeffrey
Medieval Visions and Dreams
"Loke in: How weet a wounde is here!": The Wounds of Christ as a Sacred
Space in English Devotional Literature Eleanor McCullough
Suffering in the Service of Venus: The Sacred, the Sublime, and Chaucerian
Joy in the Middle Part of the Parliament of Fowls Norm Klassen
Shakespearean Horror
Listening to Lavinia: Emmanuel Levinas's Saying and Said in Titus
Andronicus Sean Lawrence
Precious Stories: The Discursive Economy in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece
Heather G.S. Johnson
Metaphysical Afflictions
The Sacred Pain of Penitence: The Theology of John Donne's Holy Sonnets
David Anonby
Bearing the Cross: The Christian's Response to Suffering in Herbert's The
Temple Daniel W. Doerksen
The Ethical Romantic Sublime
Horrific Suffering, Sacred Terror, and Sublime Freedom in Helen Maria
Williams's Peru Natasha Duquette
Joanna Baillie and the Christian Gothic: Reforming Society through the
Sublime Christine A. Colón
Suffering and Sacrament in the Nineteenth Century
Sacramental Suffering and the Waters of Redemption and Transformation in
George Eliot's Fiction Constance M. Fulmer
Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Tractarian Suffering Esther T. Hu
Suffering in Word and in Truth: Seventeenth and Nineteenth Century Quaker
Women's Autobiography Robynne Rogers Healey
Sacred Modernism(s)
Sacramental Imagination: Eucharists of the Ordinary Universe in the Works
of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf Richard Kearney
The Via Negativa in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India George Piggford
The Fellowship of Suffering and Hope in Fantasy Literature
Consolation in Un/certainty: The Sacred Spaces of Suffering in the
Children's Fantasy Literature of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and
Madeleine L'Engle Monika Hilder
The Messiah of History: The Search for Synchronicity in Miller's A Canticle
for Leibowitz Deanna T. Smid
Violation and Redemption in Canadian Fiction
Suffering and the Sacred: Hugh Hood's The New Age / Le nouveau siécle
Barbara Pell
Fictional Violations in Alice Munro's Narratives John C. Van Rys
The American Sublime
Thomas Merton and the Aesthetics of the Sublime: A Beautiful Terror Lynn
R. Szabo
Belated Beloved: Time, Trauma, and the Sublime in Toni Morrison's Beloved
Steve Vine
Annie Dillard on Holy Ground: The Artist as Nun in the Postmodern Sublime
Deborah Bowen
Japanese (Re)Visioning of the Suffering Christ
Passion Plays by Proxy: The Paschal Face as Interculturality in Endô
Shûsaku and Mishima Yukio Sean Somers
Postmodern Aesthetics and Beyond
Testifying to the Infinity of the Other: The Sacred and Ethical Dimensions
of Secondary Witnessing in Anne Karpf's The War After Bettina Stumm
Sacred Space and the Fellowship of Suffering in the Postmodern Sublime
Richard J. Lane
Suffering Divine Things: Cruciform Reasoning or Incarnational Hermeneutics
Jens Zimmermann
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
Contributors
David Anonby is a lecturer in English at Trinity Western University. His
research areas are early modern devotional literature and religion and
literature. He is currently working on the theology of John Donne, an
interest that developed during graduate studies at the University of
British Columbia under Paul Stanwood. Other areas of interest include the
Bible as literature, Shakespeare, and the relationship between sexuality
and spirituality.
Christine A. Colón is an associate professor of English at Wheaton College
in Illinois, where she teaches courses in writing, English literature,
global literature, modern drama, and Jane Austen. She has published
articles on Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Anne Brontë, Adelaide Procter,
Caryl Churchill, Wilkie Collins, and John Keats. She is the author of the
introduction to the Valancourt edition of Joanna Baillie's Gothic dramas,
and she has recently published a monograph entitled Joanna Baillie and the
Art of Moral Influence.
Daniel W. Doerksen is Honorary Research Professor, Department of English,
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Originally from Winnipeg, he
received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1973. He
has published Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English
Church before Laud (1997) and co-edited with Christopher Hodgkins Centered
on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way (2004).
His book manuscript "Picturing Conflicts: Herbert, Calvin, and Scriptural
Portrayals of Experience" is currently under review. He has authored
articles on Spenser, Donne, Herbert, and Milton. Recent work includes
"'Generous Ambiguity' Revisited: A Herbert for All Seasons" (George Herbert
Journal 30.1-2 (2006-2007): 19-41) and "George Herbert, Calvinism, and
Reading 'Mattens,'" forthcoming in Christianity and Literature.
Natasha Duquette teaches eighteenth-century literature and critical theory
at Biola University in Southern California. She has published articles in
Mosaic, Notes and Queries, Christianity and Literature, and
Persuasions-Online. She has also edited the essay collection Sublimer
Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology (2007) and
recently contributed to Jane Austen Sings the Blues (2009). She is
currently producing a new, annotated edition of Helen Maria William's novel
Julia for Pickering & Chatto's Chawton House Library series.
Constance M. Fulmer holds the Blanche E. Seaver Chair in English Literature
and is the associate dean of Seaver College at Pepperdine University in
Malibu, California. She is working on a biography of Edith J. Simcox and a
book on George Eliot's moral aesthetic. She has published an annotated
bibliography of George Eliot criticism (1977) and with Margaret Barfield
edited A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox's
Autobiography of a Shirtmaker (1998) as well as several articles on George
Eliot and Edith Simcox. She is president of the Victorian Interdisciplinary
Studies Association of the Western United States.
Robynne Rogers Healey is an associate professor of history at Trinity
Western University in Langley, British Columbia. She is the author of From
Quaker to Upper Canadian: Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends,
1801-1850 (2006). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Quaker
History, the Canadian Quaker History Journal, the York Pioneer, and Past
Imperfect, and her essay on the diary of Sarah Welch Hill is included in
The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996
(2002).
Monika B. Hilder is an associate professor of English at Trinity Western
University. She specializes in children's literature and fantasy
literature, and her research interests include literature as moral
education, imaginative education, gender criticism, and literature and
spirituality, with a focus on George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine
L'Engle, and L.M. Montgomery. Recent publications include journal articles
and book chapters on C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, L.M. Montgomery, and
moral education.
Esther T. Hu, who received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, teaches
literature and writing at Boston University. Her publications include
"Christina Rossetti, John Keble, and the Divine Gaze" in Victorian Poetry
(2008) and a translation, "Mother Goose Got Married," in Taiwan Literature:
English Translation Series (2007). She is writing a book on Christina
Rossetti's religious poetry and has completed the translation of Heaven and
Earth: The Love Story of General Hu Tsung-Nan and Dr. Hsia-Ti Yeh into
English.
David Lyle Jeffrey, Ph.D. (Princeton) and Fellow of the Royal Society of
Canada, is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor
University. He is also Professor Emeritus of English literature at the
University of Ottawa, and has been Guest Professor at Peking University
(Beijing) since 1996 and Honorary Professor at the University of
International Business and Economics (Beijing) since 2005. His books
include A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992);
The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (1975); Chaucer and
Scriptural Tradition (1984); English Spirituality in the Age of Wesley
(1987, 1994, 2000); The Law of Love: English Spirituality in the Age of
Wyclif (1988, 2001); People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary
Culture (1996); and a co-authored book on The Bible and the University
(2007). Currently he has forthcoming a book on Christianity and literature,
co-authored by Greg Maillet (2010), and chapters for the Cambridge History
of Literary Criticism and Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible, and he
is completing a commentary on Luke for the Brazos theological commentary
series.
Heather G.S. Johnson received her Ph.D. in Renaissance English literature
from Indiana University Bloomington and is currently teaching at Southern
Illinois University Edwardsville. Her current research explores
seventeenth-century attitudes toward texts and textuality.
Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston
College. His publications include Poétique du Possible (1984); Dialogues
With Contemporary Continental Thinkers (1984); Modern Movements in European
Philosophy (1987); Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (1987);
The Wake of the Imagination (1988); Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post
Modern (1991,1998); Angel of Patrick's Hill (1991); Visions of Europe
(1993); Poetics of Modernity (1995); States of Mind: Dialogues with
Contemporary Thinkers (1995); Sam's Fall (1995); Walking at Sea Level
(1997); Desiderio et Dio (1996); The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of
Religion (2001); On Stories: Thinking in Action (2001); Strangers, Gods,
and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (2002); Debates in Continental
Philosophy: Richard Kearney in Conversation with Contemporary Thinkers
(2004); The Owl of Minerva: Encountering Paul Ricoeur (2004); and
Navigations: Collected Irish Essays, 1976-2006 (2006).
Norm Klassen is an associate professor and the current chair of English at
St. Jerome's University, federated with the University of Waterloo. He is
the author of Chaucer on Love, Knowledge, and Sight (1995) and co-author of
The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of
University Education (2006). Recent publications include notes and articles
in Notes and Queries and Quaderni d'Italianistica as well as book chapters
in A Concise Companion to Chaucer (2005), The Strategic Smorgasbord of
Postmodernity: Literature and the Christian Critic (2007), and Tradition
and Formation: Claiming an Inheritance (2009).
Richard J. Lane teaches in the English Department at Vancouver Island
University, where he also directs the Literary Theory Research Group and
the Seminar for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He is the author or
editor of nine academic books, including Image Technologies in Canadian
Literature (2009), the single-authored Fifty Key Literary Theorists (2006),
The Postcolonial Novel (2005), and Reading Walter Benjamin: Writing through
the Catastrophe (2005). His Jean Baudrillard (2000, second expanded edition
2009) has been translated into Japanese and Korean. Lane writes the
"Canada" section of The Year's Work in English Studies for Oxford
University Press and The English Association.
Sean Lawrence is an assistant professor in the Department of Critical
Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). He has published
on Elizabethan drama in journals such as the European Journal of English
Studies, English Studies in Canada, and Renascence: Essays on Values in
Literature. He is currently completing a book project entitled Forgiving
the Gift: Exchange and Forgiveness in Marlowe and Shakespeare.
Eleanor McCullough, a graduate of the University of Oxford and Regent
College, is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the
University of York, England. Her current research involves investigating
the ways in which late-medieval laypeople accessed the liturgy through
vernacular lyrics and prayers in English and Anglo-Norman. She was recently
granted a fellowship by the church of All Saints North Street to
reconstruct a medieval mass for the Use of York, which was performed and
published in 2009. McCullough lectures on medieval literature and theology
in the Oxford Scholars and Christians in Residence summer program.
Holly Faith Nelson, an associate professor of English and co-director of
the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University, has co-edited
The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose (2000); Of
Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton (2005); Eikon
Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes (2006); and James Hogg and the
Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author
(2009). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Studies in English
Literature, Studies in Philology, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Scintilla,
Studies in Hogg and his World, and The Year's Work in English Studies.
Barbara Pell was a much loved and admired professor of English at Trinity
Western University. She taught at Trinity for nearly twenty years before
her death on March 9, 2009. Her publications include two monographs-Faith
and Fiction: A Theological Critique of the Narrative Strategies of Hugh
MacLennan and Morley Callaghan (1998) and A Portrait of the Artist: Ernest
Buckler's "The Mountain and the Valley" (1995)-as well as numerous articles
and book chapters on Canadian literature. She was the recipient of the
Davis Distinguished Teaching Award in 2006 and a Leading Women Award in
2008.
George Piggford is an associate professor of English and Martin Fellow in
Catholic Studies at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. He compiled
and edited Forster's The Feminine Note in Literature (2000) and is
co-editor of Queer Forster (1997). He has published on modernism and
postmodernism in journals including English Studies in Canada, Modern
Drama, and Mosaic, and in the collections American Gothic (1998), American
Modernism across the Arts (1999), and The Strategic Smorgasbord of
Postmodernity (2008). He is currently at work on a project on Flannery
O'Connor and the languages of mysticism.
Deanna T. Smid is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Her
dissertation, "'The world in man's heart': The Faculty of Imagination in
Early Modern English Literature", supervised by Mary Silcox, explores early
modern perceptions of imagination as a medical, philosophical, and
psychological construct which is then used and stimulated in works of
literature. Studying imagination is one of the consequences of her interest
in science fiction and in proto-scientific literary works. Her research
interests also include devotional poetry and English emblem books.
Sean Somers teaches in the English Department at the University of British
Columbia. He has published several articles and book chapters on
translation theory and the intercultural connections between Japan and
Europe in the twentieth century. His monograph Ancestral Recall: The Celtic
Revival and Japanese Modernism is currently under review.
Bettina Stumm is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia,
Canada. Her work examines the intersections between ethics and
collaborative autobiography and develops an ethical framework for secondary
witnessing in trauma communities. She recently assisted in writing the
Holocaust memoir, A Long Labour, with survivor Rhodea Shandler and is
currently the reviews editor for Life Writing.
Lynn R. Szabo is an associate professor of English at Trinity Western
University where she teaches American literature and creative writing. She
is a scholar of the poet and mystic Thomas Merton and is the editor of the
first comprehensive edition of Merton's poetry, In the Dark before Dawn:
New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton (2005). She has written primarily on
poetics and language, particularly on their relationship to silence and
solitude in the American literary tradition.
John Van Rys, a graduate of Dalhousie, is a professor of English at
Redeemer University College. He has written on a range of modern Canadian
writers, including Al Purdy, Margaret Avison, Ernest Buckler, Robertson
Davies, and Alice Munro, as well as on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. His
current research focuses on cross-border writing, such as the fiction of
Guy Vanderhaeghe and Annie Proulx; on the Canadian historical novel,
particularly on suffering and trauma; and on the complexities of Munro's
short stories, including their historical dimensions, their moral
complexity, and their formal openness. He has also co-authored The Research
Writer: Curiosity, Discovery, Dialogue (forthcoming).
Steve Vine is a senior lecturer in English at Swansea University, Wales,
where he specializes in teaching Romantic literature and literary theory.
As well as articles and book chapters on Romanticism and theory, his
publications include Blake's Poetry: Spectral Visions (1993), the Penguin
edition of D.H. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod (1995), Emily Brontë (1998),
Literature in Psychoanalysis: A Reader (2005), and William Blake (2007). He
is currently writing a book entitled Reinventing the Sublime: Post-Romantic
Literature and Theory.
Jens Zimmermann is a professor of English and Canada Research Chair in
Religion, Interpretation, and Culture at Trinity Western University. He is
the author of Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An
Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation (2004) and Theologische
Hermeneutik (2008); co-author of The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational
Humanism and the Future of University Education (2006); and co-editor of
Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy (2009). His
articles have appeared in journals such as Christianity and Literature, the
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, the Journal of Beliefs
and Values: Studies in Religion and Education, the Journal for Hermeneutics
and Postmodern Thought, and Philosophy Today.
Table of Contents for Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and
the Sublime in Literature and Theory, edited by Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R.
Szabo, and Jens Zimmermann
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Trauma and Transcendence: An Introduction Holly Faith Nelson
The Classical and Biblical Inheritance
Sacred Proposals and the Spiritual Sublime David Lyle Jeffrey
Medieval Visions and Dreams
"Loke in: How weet a wounde is here!": The Wounds of Christ as a Sacred
Space in English Devotional Literature Eleanor McCullough
Suffering in the Service of Venus: The Sacred, the Sublime, and Chaucerian
Joy in the Middle Part of the Parliament of Fowls Norm Klassen
Shakespearean Horror
Listening to Lavinia: Emmanuel Levinas's Saying and Said in Titus
Andronicus Sean Lawrence
Precious Stories: The Discursive Economy in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece
Heather G.S. Johnson
Metaphysical Afflictions
The Sacred Pain of Penitence: The Theology of John Donne's Holy Sonnets
David Anonby
Bearing the Cross: The Christian's Response to Suffering in Herbert's The
Temple Daniel W. Doerksen
The Ethical Romantic Sublime
Horrific Suffering, Sacred Terror, and Sublime Freedom in Helen Maria
Williams's Peru Natasha Duquette
Joanna Baillie and the Christian Gothic: Reforming Society through the
Sublime Christine A. Colón
Suffering and Sacrament in the Nineteenth Century
Sacramental Suffering and the Waters of Redemption and Transformation in
George Eliot's Fiction Constance M. Fulmer
Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Tractarian Suffering Esther T. Hu
Suffering in Word and in Truth: Seventeenth and Nineteenth Century Quaker
Women's Autobiography Robynne Rogers Healey
Sacred Modernism(s)
Sacramental Imagination: Eucharists of the Ordinary Universe in the Works
of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf Richard Kearney
The Via Negativa in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India George Piggford
The Fellowship of Suffering and Hope in Fantasy Literature
Consolation in Un/certainty: The Sacred Spaces of Suffering in the
Children's Fantasy Literature of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and
Madeleine L'Engle Monika Hilder
The Messiah of History: The Search for Synchronicity in Miller's A Canticle
for Leibowitz Deanna T. Smid
Violation and Redemption in Canadian Fiction
Suffering and the Sacred: Hugh Hood's The New Age / Le nouveau siécle
Barbara Pell
Fictional Violations in Alice Munro's Narratives John C. Van Rys
The American Sublime
Thomas Merton and the Aesthetics of the Sublime: A Beautiful Terror Lynn
R. Szabo
Belated Beloved: Time, Trauma, and the Sublime in Toni Morrison's Beloved
Steve Vine
Annie Dillard on Holy Ground: The Artist as Nun in the Postmodern Sublime
Deborah Bowen
Japanese (Re)Visioning of the Suffering Christ
Passion Plays by Proxy: The Paschal Face as Interculturality in Endô
Shûsaku and Mishima Yukio Sean Somers
Postmodern Aesthetics and Beyond
Testifying to the Infinity of the Other: The Sacred and Ethical Dimensions
of Secondary Witnessing in Anne Karpf's The War After Bettina Stumm
Sacred Space and the Fellowship of Suffering in the Postmodern Sublime
Richard J. Lane
Suffering Divine Things: Cruciform Reasoning or Incarnational Hermeneutics
Jens Zimmermann
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
Contributors
David Anonby is a lecturer in English at Trinity Western University. His
research areas are early modern devotional literature and religion and
literature. He is currently working on the theology of John Donne, an
interest that developed during graduate studies at the University of
British Columbia under Paul Stanwood. Other areas of interest include the
Bible as literature, Shakespeare, and the relationship between sexuality
and spirituality.
Christine A. Colón is an associate professor of English at Wheaton College
in Illinois, where she teaches courses in writing, English literature,
global literature, modern drama, and Jane Austen. She has published
articles on Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Anne Brontë, Adelaide Procter,
Caryl Churchill, Wilkie Collins, and John Keats. She is the author of the
introduction to the Valancourt edition of Joanna Baillie's Gothic dramas,
and she has recently published a monograph entitled Joanna Baillie and the
Art of Moral Influence.
Daniel W. Doerksen is Honorary Research Professor, Department of English,
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Originally from Winnipeg, he
received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1973. He
has published Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English
Church before Laud (1997) and co-edited with Christopher Hodgkins Centered
on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way (2004).
His book manuscript "Picturing Conflicts: Herbert, Calvin, and Scriptural
Portrayals of Experience" is currently under review. He has authored
articles on Spenser, Donne, Herbert, and Milton. Recent work includes
"'Generous Ambiguity' Revisited: A Herbert for All Seasons" (George Herbert
Journal 30.1-2 (2006-2007): 19-41) and "George Herbert, Calvinism, and
Reading 'Mattens,'" forthcoming in Christianity and Literature.
Natasha Duquette teaches eighteenth-century literature and critical theory
at Biola University in Southern California. She has published articles in
Mosaic, Notes and Queries, Christianity and Literature, and
Persuasions-Online. She has also edited the essay collection Sublimer
Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology (2007) and
recently contributed to Jane Austen Sings the Blues (2009). She is
currently producing a new, annotated edition of Helen Maria William's novel
Julia for Pickering & Chatto's Chawton House Library series.
Constance M. Fulmer holds the Blanche E. Seaver Chair in English Literature
and is the associate dean of Seaver College at Pepperdine University in
Malibu, California. She is working on a biography of Edith J. Simcox and a
book on George Eliot's moral aesthetic. She has published an annotated
bibliography of George Eliot criticism (1977) and with Margaret Barfield
edited A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox's
Autobiography of a Shirtmaker (1998) as well as several articles on George
Eliot and Edith Simcox. She is president of the Victorian Interdisciplinary
Studies Association of the Western United States.
Robynne Rogers Healey is an associate professor of history at Trinity
Western University in Langley, British Columbia. She is the author of From
Quaker to Upper Canadian: Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends,
1801-1850 (2006). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Quaker
History, the Canadian Quaker History Journal, the York Pioneer, and Past
Imperfect, and her essay on the diary of Sarah Welch Hill is included in
The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996
(2002).
Monika B. Hilder is an associate professor of English at Trinity Western
University. She specializes in children's literature and fantasy
literature, and her research interests include literature as moral
education, imaginative education, gender criticism, and literature and
spirituality, with a focus on George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine
L'Engle, and L.M. Montgomery. Recent publications include journal articles
and book chapters on C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, L.M. Montgomery, and
moral education.
Esther T. Hu, who received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, teaches
literature and writing at Boston University. Her publications include
"Christina Rossetti, John Keble, and the Divine Gaze" in Victorian Poetry
(2008) and a translation, "Mother Goose Got Married," in Taiwan Literature:
English Translation Series (2007). She is writing a book on Christina
Rossetti's religious poetry and has completed the translation of Heaven and
Earth: The Love Story of General Hu Tsung-Nan and Dr. Hsia-Ti Yeh into
English.
David Lyle Jeffrey, Ph.D. (Princeton) and Fellow of the Royal Society of
Canada, is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor
University. He is also Professor Emeritus of English literature at the
University of Ottawa, and has been Guest Professor at Peking University
(Beijing) since 1996 and Honorary Professor at the University of
International Business and Economics (Beijing) since 2005. His books
include A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992);
The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (1975); Chaucer and
Scriptural Tradition (1984); English Spirituality in the Age of Wesley
(1987, 1994, 2000); The Law of Love: English Spirituality in the Age of
Wyclif (1988, 2001); People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary
Culture (1996); and a co-authored book on The Bible and the University
(2007). Currently he has forthcoming a book on Christianity and literature,
co-authored by Greg Maillet (2010), and chapters for the Cambridge History
of Literary Criticism and Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible, and he
is completing a commentary on Luke for the Brazos theological commentary
series.
Heather G.S. Johnson received her Ph.D. in Renaissance English literature
from Indiana University Bloomington and is currently teaching at Southern
Illinois University Edwardsville. Her current research explores
seventeenth-century attitudes toward texts and textuality.
Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston
College. His publications include Poétique du Possible (1984); Dialogues
With Contemporary Continental Thinkers (1984); Modern Movements in European
Philosophy (1987); Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (1987);
The Wake of the Imagination (1988); Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post
Modern (1991,1998); Angel of Patrick's Hill (1991); Visions of Europe
(1993); Poetics of Modernity (1995); States of Mind: Dialogues with
Contemporary Thinkers (1995); Sam's Fall (1995); Walking at Sea Level
(1997); Desiderio et Dio (1996); The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of
Religion (2001); On Stories: Thinking in Action (2001); Strangers, Gods,
and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (2002); Debates in Continental
Philosophy: Richard Kearney in Conversation with Contemporary Thinkers
(2004); The Owl of Minerva: Encountering Paul Ricoeur (2004); and
Navigations: Collected Irish Essays, 1976-2006 (2006).
Norm Klassen is an associate professor and the current chair of English at
St. Jerome's University, federated with the University of Waterloo. He is
the author of Chaucer on Love, Knowledge, and Sight (1995) and co-author of
The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of
University Education (2006). Recent publications include notes and articles
in Notes and Queries and Quaderni d'Italianistica as well as book chapters
in A Concise Companion to Chaucer (2005), The Strategic Smorgasbord of
Postmodernity: Literature and the Christian Critic (2007), and Tradition
and Formation: Claiming an Inheritance (2009).
Richard J. Lane teaches in the English Department at Vancouver Island
University, where he also directs the Literary Theory Research Group and
the Seminar for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He is the author or
editor of nine academic books, including Image Technologies in Canadian
Literature (2009), the single-authored Fifty Key Literary Theorists (2006),
The Postcolonial Novel (2005), and Reading Walter Benjamin: Writing through
the Catastrophe (2005). His Jean Baudrillard (2000, second expanded edition
2009) has been translated into Japanese and Korean. Lane writes the
"Canada" section of The Year's Work in English Studies for Oxford
University Press and The English Association.
Sean Lawrence is an assistant professor in the Department of Critical
Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). He has published
on Elizabethan drama in journals such as the European Journal of English
Studies, English Studies in Canada, and Renascence: Essays on Values in
Literature. He is currently completing a book project entitled Forgiving
the Gift: Exchange and Forgiveness in Marlowe and Shakespeare.
Eleanor McCullough, a graduate of the University of Oxford and Regent
College, is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the
University of York, England. Her current research involves investigating
the ways in which late-medieval laypeople accessed the liturgy through
vernacular lyrics and prayers in English and Anglo-Norman. She was recently
granted a fellowship by the church of All Saints North Street to
reconstruct a medieval mass for the Use of York, which was performed and
published in 2009. McCullough lectures on medieval literature and theology
in the Oxford Scholars and Christians in Residence summer program.
Holly Faith Nelson, an associate professor of English and co-director of
the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University, has co-edited
The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose (2000); Of
Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton (2005); Eikon
Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes (2006); and James Hogg and the
Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author
(2009). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Studies in English
Literature, Studies in Philology, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Scintilla,
Studies in Hogg and his World, and The Year's Work in English Studies.
Barbara Pell was a much loved and admired professor of English at Trinity
Western University. She taught at Trinity for nearly twenty years before
her death on March 9, 2009. Her publications include two monographs-Faith
and Fiction: A Theological Critique of the Narrative Strategies of Hugh
MacLennan and Morley Callaghan (1998) and A Portrait of the Artist: Ernest
Buckler's "The Mountain and the Valley" (1995)-as well as numerous articles
and book chapters on Canadian literature. She was the recipient of the
Davis Distinguished Teaching Award in 2006 and a Leading Women Award in
2008.
George Piggford is an associate professor of English and Martin Fellow in
Catholic Studies at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. He compiled
and edited Forster's The Feminine Note in Literature (2000) and is
co-editor of Queer Forster (1997). He has published on modernism and
postmodernism in journals including English Studies in Canada, Modern
Drama, and Mosaic, and in the collections American Gothic (1998), American
Modernism across the Arts (1999), and The Strategic Smorgasbord of
Postmodernity (2008). He is currently at work on a project on Flannery
O'Connor and the languages of mysticism.
Deanna T. Smid is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Her
dissertation, "'The world in man's heart': The Faculty of Imagination in
Early Modern English Literature", supervised by Mary Silcox, explores early
modern perceptions of imagination as a medical, philosophical, and
psychological construct which is then used and stimulated in works of
literature. Studying imagination is one of the consequences of her interest
in science fiction and in proto-scientific literary works. Her research
interests also include devotional poetry and English emblem books.
Sean Somers teaches in the English Department at the University of British
Columbia. He has published several articles and book chapters on
translation theory and the intercultural connections between Japan and
Europe in the twentieth century. His monograph Ancestral Recall: The Celtic
Revival and Japanese Modernism is currently under review.
Bettina Stumm is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia,
Canada. Her work examines the intersections between ethics and
collaborative autobiography and develops an ethical framework for secondary
witnessing in trauma communities. She recently assisted in writing the
Holocaust memoir, A Long Labour, with survivor Rhodea Shandler and is
currently the reviews editor for Life Writing.
Lynn R. Szabo is an associate professor of English at Trinity Western
University where she teaches American literature and creative writing. She
is a scholar of the poet and mystic Thomas Merton and is the editor of the
first comprehensive edition of Merton's poetry, In the Dark before Dawn:
New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton (2005). She has written primarily on
poetics and language, particularly on their relationship to silence and
solitude in the American literary tradition.
John Van Rys, a graduate of Dalhousie, is a professor of English at
Redeemer University College. He has written on a range of modern Canadian
writers, including Al Purdy, Margaret Avison, Ernest Buckler, Robertson
Davies, and Alice Munro, as well as on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. His
current research focuses on cross-border writing, such as the fiction of
Guy Vanderhaeghe and Annie Proulx; on the Canadian historical novel,
particularly on suffering and trauma; and on the complexities of Munro's
short stories, including their historical dimensions, their moral
complexity, and their formal openness. He has also co-authored The Research
Writer: Curiosity, Discovery, Dialogue (forthcoming).
Steve Vine is a senior lecturer in English at Swansea University, Wales,
where he specializes in teaching Romantic literature and literary theory.
As well as articles and book chapters on Romanticism and theory, his
publications include Blake's Poetry: Spectral Visions (1993), the Penguin
edition of D.H. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod (1995), Emily Brontë (1998),
Literature in Psychoanalysis: A Reader (2005), and William Blake (2007). He
is currently writing a book entitled Reinventing the Sublime: Post-Romantic
Literature and Theory.
Jens Zimmermann is a professor of English and Canada Research Chair in
Religion, Interpretation, and Culture at Trinity Western University. He is
the author of Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An
Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation (2004) and Theologische
Hermeneutik (2008); co-author of The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational
Humanism and the Future of University Education (2006); and co-editor of
Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy (2009). His
articles have appeared in journals such as Christianity and Literature, the
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, the Journal of Beliefs
and Values: Studies in Religion and Education, the Journal for Hermeneutics
and Postmodern Thought, and Philosophy Today.
the Sublime in Literature and Theory, edited by Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R.
Szabo, and Jens Zimmermann
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Trauma and Transcendence: An Introduction Holly Faith Nelson
The Classical and Biblical Inheritance
Sacred Proposals and the Spiritual Sublime David Lyle Jeffrey
Medieval Visions and Dreams
"Loke in: How weet a wounde is here!": The Wounds of Christ as a Sacred
Space in English Devotional Literature Eleanor McCullough
Suffering in the Service of Venus: The Sacred, the Sublime, and Chaucerian
Joy in the Middle Part of the Parliament of Fowls Norm Klassen
Shakespearean Horror
Listening to Lavinia: Emmanuel Levinas's Saying and Said in Titus
Andronicus Sean Lawrence
Precious Stories: The Discursive Economy in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece
Heather G.S. Johnson
Metaphysical Afflictions
The Sacred Pain of Penitence: The Theology of John Donne's Holy Sonnets
David Anonby
Bearing the Cross: The Christian's Response to Suffering in Herbert's The
Temple Daniel W. Doerksen
The Ethical Romantic Sublime
Horrific Suffering, Sacred Terror, and Sublime Freedom in Helen Maria
Williams's Peru Natasha Duquette
Joanna Baillie and the Christian Gothic: Reforming Society through the
Sublime Christine A. Colón
Suffering and Sacrament in the Nineteenth Century
Sacramental Suffering and the Waters of Redemption and Transformation in
George Eliot's Fiction Constance M. Fulmer
Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Tractarian Suffering Esther T. Hu
Suffering in Word and in Truth: Seventeenth and Nineteenth Century Quaker
Women's Autobiography Robynne Rogers Healey
Sacred Modernism(s)
Sacramental Imagination: Eucharists of the Ordinary Universe in the Works
of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf Richard Kearney
The Via Negativa in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India George Piggford
The Fellowship of Suffering and Hope in Fantasy Literature
Consolation in Un/certainty: The Sacred Spaces of Suffering in the
Children's Fantasy Literature of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and
Madeleine L'Engle Monika Hilder
The Messiah of History: The Search for Synchronicity in Miller's A Canticle
for Leibowitz Deanna T. Smid
Violation and Redemption in Canadian Fiction
Suffering and the Sacred: Hugh Hood's The New Age / Le nouveau siécle
Barbara Pell
Fictional Violations in Alice Munro's Narratives John C. Van Rys
The American Sublime
Thomas Merton and the Aesthetics of the Sublime: A Beautiful Terror Lynn
R. Szabo
Belated Beloved: Time, Trauma, and the Sublime in Toni Morrison's Beloved
Steve Vine
Annie Dillard on Holy Ground: The Artist as Nun in the Postmodern Sublime
Deborah Bowen
Japanese (Re)Visioning of the Suffering Christ
Passion Plays by Proxy: The Paschal Face as Interculturality in Endô
Shûsaku and Mishima Yukio Sean Somers
Postmodern Aesthetics and Beyond
Testifying to the Infinity of the Other: The Sacred and Ethical Dimensions
of Secondary Witnessing in Anne Karpf's The War After Bettina Stumm
Sacred Space and the Fellowship of Suffering in the Postmodern Sublime
Richard J. Lane
Suffering Divine Things: Cruciform Reasoning or Incarnational Hermeneutics
Jens Zimmermann
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
Contributors
David Anonby is a lecturer in English at Trinity Western University. His
research areas are early modern devotional literature and religion and
literature. He is currently working on the theology of John Donne, an
interest that developed during graduate studies at the University of
British Columbia under Paul Stanwood. Other areas of interest include the
Bible as literature, Shakespeare, and the relationship between sexuality
and spirituality.
Christine A. Colón is an associate professor of English at Wheaton College
in Illinois, where she teaches courses in writing, English literature,
global literature, modern drama, and Jane Austen. She has published
articles on Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Anne Brontë, Adelaide Procter,
Caryl Churchill, Wilkie Collins, and John Keats. She is the author of the
introduction to the Valancourt edition of Joanna Baillie's Gothic dramas,
and she has recently published a monograph entitled Joanna Baillie and the
Art of Moral Influence.
Daniel W. Doerksen is Honorary Research Professor, Department of English,
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Originally from Winnipeg, he
received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1973. He
has published Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English
Church before Laud (1997) and co-edited with Christopher Hodgkins Centered
on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way (2004).
His book manuscript "Picturing Conflicts: Herbert, Calvin, and Scriptural
Portrayals of Experience" is currently under review. He has authored
articles on Spenser, Donne, Herbert, and Milton. Recent work includes
"'Generous Ambiguity' Revisited: A Herbert for All Seasons" (George Herbert
Journal 30.1-2 (2006-2007): 19-41) and "George Herbert, Calvinism, and
Reading 'Mattens,'" forthcoming in Christianity and Literature.
Natasha Duquette teaches eighteenth-century literature and critical theory
at Biola University in Southern California. She has published articles in
Mosaic, Notes and Queries, Christianity and Literature, and
Persuasions-Online. She has also edited the essay collection Sublimer
Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology (2007) and
recently contributed to Jane Austen Sings the Blues (2009). She is
currently producing a new, annotated edition of Helen Maria William's novel
Julia for Pickering & Chatto's Chawton House Library series.
Constance M. Fulmer holds the Blanche E. Seaver Chair in English Literature
and is the associate dean of Seaver College at Pepperdine University in
Malibu, California. She is working on a biography of Edith J. Simcox and a
book on George Eliot's moral aesthetic. She has published an annotated
bibliography of George Eliot criticism (1977) and with Margaret Barfield
edited A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox's
Autobiography of a Shirtmaker (1998) as well as several articles on George
Eliot and Edith Simcox. She is president of the Victorian Interdisciplinary
Studies Association of the Western United States.
Robynne Rogers Healey is an associate professor of history at Trinity
Western University in Langley, British Columbia. She is the author of From
Quaker to Upper Canadian: Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends,
1801-1850 (2006). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Quaker
History, the Canadian Quaker History Journal, the York Pioneer, and Past
Imperfect, and her essay on the diary of Sarah Welch Hill is included in
The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996
(2002).
Monika B. Hilder is an associate professor of English at Trinity Western
University. She specializes in children's literature and fantasy
literature, and her research interests include literature as moral
education, imaginative education, gender criticism, and literature and
spirituality, with a focus on George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine
L'Engle, and L.M. Montgomery. Recent publications include journal articles
and book chapters on C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, L.M. Montgomery, and
moral education.
Esther T. Hu, who received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, teaches
literature and writing at Boston University. Her publications include
"Christina Rossetti, John Keble, and the Divine Gaze" in Victorian Poetry
(2008) and a translation, "Mother Goose Got Married," in Taiwan Literature:
English Translation Series (2007). She is writing a book on Christina
Rossetti's religious poetry and has completed the translation of Heaven and
Earth: The Love Story of General Hu Tsung-Nan and Dr. Hsia-Ti Yeh into
English.
David Lyle Jeffrey, Ph.D. (Princeton) and Fellow of the Royal Society of
Canada, is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor
University. He is also Professor Emeritus of English literature at the
University of Ottawa, and has been Guest Professor at Peking University
(Beijing) since 1996 and Honorary Professor at the University of
International Business and Economics (Beijing) since 2005. His books
include A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992);
The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (1975); Chaucer and
Scriptural Tradition (1984); English Spirituality in the Age of Wesley
(1987, 1994, 2000); The Law of Love: English Spirituality in the Age of
Wyclif (1988, 2001); People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary
Culture (1996); and a co-authored book on The Bible and the University
(2007). Currently he has forthcoming a book on Christianity and literature,
co-authored by Greg Maillet (2010), and chapters for the Cambridge History
of Literary Criticism and Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible, and he
is completing a commentary on Luke for the Brazos theological commentary
series.
Heather G.S. Johnson received her Ph.D. in Renaissance English literature
from Indiana University Bloomington and is currently teaching at Southern
Illinois University Edwardsville. Her current research explores
seventeenth-century attitudes toward texts and textuality.
Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston
College. His publications include Poétique du Possible (1984); Dialogues
With Contemporary Continental Thinkers (1984); Modern Movements in European
Philosophy (1987); Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (1987);
The Wake of the Imagination (1988); Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post
Modern (1991,1998); Angel of Patrick's Hill (1991); Visions of Europe
(1993); Poetics of Modernity (1995); States of Mind: Dialogues with
Contemporary Thinkers (1995); Sam's Fall (1995); Walking at Sea Level
(1997); Desiderio et Dio (1996); The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of
Religion (2001); On Stories: Thinking in Action (2001); Strangers, Gods,
and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (2002); Debates in Continental
Philosophy: Richard Kearney in Conversation with Contemporary Thinkers
(2004); The Owl of Minerva: Encountering Paul Ricoeur (2004); and
Navigations: Collected Irish Essays, 1976-2006 (2006).
Norm Klassen is an associate professor and the current chair of English at
St. Jerome's University, federated with the University of Waterloo. He is
the author of Chaucer on Love, Knowledge, and Sight (1995) and co-author of
The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of
University Education (2006). Recent publications include notes and articles
in Notes and Queries and Quaderni d'Italianistica as well as book chapters
in A Concise Companion to Chaucer (2005), The Strategic Smorgasbord of
Postmodernity: Literature and the Christian Critic (2007), and Tradition
and Formation: Claiming an Inheritance (2009).
Richard J. Lane teaches in the English Department at Vancouver Island
University, where he also directs the Literary Theory Research Group and
the Seminar for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He is the author or
editor of nine academic books, including Image Technologies in Canadian
Literature (2009), the single-authored Fifty Key Literary Theorists (2006),
The Postcolonial Novel (2005), and Reading Walter Benjamin: Writing through
the Catastrophe (2005). His Jean Baudrillard (2000, second expanded edition
2009) has been translated into Japanese and Korean. Lane writes the
"Canada" section of The Year's Work in English Studies for Oxford
University Press and The English Association.
Sean Lawrence is an assistant professor in the Department of Critical
Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). He has published
on Elizabethan drama in journals such as the European Journal of English
Studies, English Studies in Canada, and Renascence: Essays on Values in
Literature. He is currently completing a book project entitled Forgiving
the Gift: Exchange and Forgiveness in Marlowe and Shakespeare.
Eleanor McCullough, a graduate of the University of Oxford and Regent
College, is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the
University of York, England. Her current research involves investigating
the ways in which late-medieval laypeople accessed the liturgy through
vernacular lyrics and prayers in English and Anglo-Norman. She was recently
granted a fellowship by the church of All Saints North Street to
reconstruct a medieval mass for the Use of York, which was performed and
published in 2009. McCullough lectures on medieval literature and theology
in the Oxford Scholars and Christians in Residence summer program.
Holly Faith Nelson, an associate professor of English and co-director of
the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University, has co-edited
The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose (2000); Of
Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton (2005); Eikon
Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes (2006); and James Hogg and the
Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author
(2009). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Studies in English
Literature, Studies in Philology, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Scintilla,
Studies in Hogg and his World, and The Year's Work in English Studies.
Barbara Pell was a much loved and admired professor of English at Trinity
Western University. She taught at Trinity for nearly twenty years before
her death on March 9, 2009. Her publications include two monographs-Faith
and Fiction: A Theological Critique of the Narrative Strategies of Hugh
MacLennan and Morley Callaghan (1998) and A Portrait of the Artist: Ernest
Buckler's "The Mountain and the Valley" (1995)-as well as numerous articles
and book chapters on Canadian literature. She was the recipient of the
Davis Distinguished Teaching Award in 2006 and a Leading Women Award in
2008.
George Piggford is an associate professor of English and Martin Fellow in
Catholic Studies at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. He compiled
and edited Forster's The Feminine Note in Literature (2000) and is
co-editor of Queer Forster (1997). He has published on modernism and
postmodernism in journals including English Studies in Canada, Modern
Drama, and Mosaic, and in the collections American Gothic (1998), American
Modernism across the Arts (1999), and The Strategic Smorgasbord of
Postmodernity (2008). He is currently at work on a project on Flannery
O'Connor and the languages of mysticism.
Deanna T. Smid is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Her
dissertation, "'The world in man's heart': The Faculty of Imagination in
Early Modern English Literature", supervised by Mary Silcox, explores early
modern perceptions of imagination as a medical, philosophical, and
psychological construct which is then used and stimulated in works of
literature. Studying imagination is one of the consequences of her interest
in science fiction and in proto-scientific literary works. Her research
interests also include devotional poetry and English emblem books.
Sean Somers teaches in the English Department at the University of British
Columbia. He has published several articles and book chapters on
translation theory and the intercultural connections between Japan and
Europe in the twentieth century. His monograph Ancestral Recall: The Celtic
Revival and Japanese Modernism is currently under review.
Bettina Stumm is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia,
Canada. Her work examines the intersections between ethics and
collaborative autobiography and develops an ethical framework for secondary
witnessing in trauma communities. She recently assisted in writing the
Holocaust memoir, A Long Labour, with survivor Rhodea Shandler and is
currently the reviews editor for Life Writing.
Lynn R. Szabo is an associate professor of English at Trinity Western
University where she teaches American literature and creative writing. She
is a scholar of the poet and mystic Thomas Merton and is the editor of the
first comprehensive edition of Merton's poetry, In the Dark before Dawn:
New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton (2005). She has written primarily on
poetics and language, particularly on their relationship to silence and
solitude in the American literary tradition.
John Van Rys, a graduate of Dalhousie, is a professor of English at
Redeemer University College. He has written on a range of modern Canadian
writers, including Al Purdy, Margaret Avison, Ernest Buckler, Robertson
Davies, and Alice Munro, as well as on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. His
current research focuses on cross-border writing, such as the fiction of
Guy Vanderhaeghe and Annie Proulx; on the Canadian historical novel,
particularly on suffering and trauma; and on the complexities of Munro's
short stories, including their historical dimensions, their moral
complexity, and their formal openness. He has also co-authored The Research
Writer: Curiosity, Discovery, Dialogue (forthcoming).
Steve Vine is a senior lecturer in English at Swansea University, Wales,
where he specializes in teaching Romantic literature and literary theory.
As well as articles and book chapters on Romanticism and theory, his
publications include Blake's Poetry: Spectral Visions (1993), the Penguin
edition of D.H. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod (1995), Emily Brontë (1998),
Literature in Psychoanalysis: A Reader (2005), and William Blake (2007). He
is currently writing a book entitled Reinventing the Sublime: Post-Romantic
Literature and Theory.
Jens Zimmermann is a professor of English and Canada Research Chair in
Religion, Interpretation, and Culture at Trinity Western University. He is
the author of Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An
Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation (2004) and Theologische
Hermeneutik (2008); co-author of The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational
Humanism and the Future of University Education (2006); and co-editor of
Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy (2009). His
articles have appeared in journals such as Christianity and Literature, the
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, the Journal of Beliefs
and Values: Studies in Religion and Education, the Journal for Hermeneutics
and Postmodern Thought, and Philosophy Today.