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Although Tolkien's letters call Samwise Gamgee the "chief hero" of The Lord of the Rings, Sam is easily underestimated by both readers and critics. Recovering Consolation focuses attention on Sam's point of view throughout the long journey that is the novel. This book responds to Frodo's famous words at the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, imagining a child speaking to a parent: "I want to hear more about Sam, dad; why didn't they put in more of his talk, dad? That's what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn't have got far without Sam, would he, dad?" Listening to Sam not only makes us laugh but also shows him to be, like Tolkien himself, a master of mythopoesis; as the novel's narrator puts it, "Sam had more on his mind than gardening." Yet the concrete act of gardening, another passion that Sam shares with Tolkien, should help us to understand how consolation is recovered, as is well explained in Tolkien's great essay, "On Fairy Stories." Both there and in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien offers a "theological aesthetic" that has much to teach us. Although we may not realize it while laughing along with Sam, this humble servant-hobbit is key to this aesthetic.
This book follows the recent ‘turn to religion’ that has been so important to English Studies in the 21st century, and builds on many of the recent biographies of Shakespeare that have explored the playwright’s religious views. While noticing biography, the focus of this book is upon the onstage action of King Lear, arguing that its ‘theodicy’ can be understood as the expansion of theological vision. The book makes this argument by drawing on an approach to literature known as ‘theological aesthetics,’ an approach pioneered by Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Engaging with not only W.R. Elton, but also other Shakespeare scholars such as Jan Kott and Kenneth Muir, it combines theological argument, performance criticism, and dramatic analysis to argue for a theological reading of King Lear.
"In his analysis, Marvin Rosenberg sets out to steer a path between the "extremes" of Rome and Egypt and all they stand for: and to explore the relentless "to and back" confrontation of their different sets of values which leads ultimately to destruction."
First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
In 1951, theologian H. Richard Niebuhr published Christ and Culture, a hugely influential book that set the agenda for the church and cultural engagement for the next several decades. But Niebuhr's model was devised in and for a predominantly Christian cultural setting. How do we best understand the church and its writers in a world that is less and less Christian? Craig Carter critiques Niebuhr's still pervasive models and proposes a typology better suited to mission after Christendom.
Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for further investigation of the complex relationship between the fraught religio-political culture of the early modern period and the theater that it spawned. Joining historians in rejecting the received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a water spigot in response to sixteenth-century religious reform, the early modern British theater scholars in this collection turn their attention to the vestiges of Catholic traditio...
Gerald Hill uses familiar images from nature, sports and creative writing to create these captivating mediations on life and love, family, and loss. Although there is much longing and loneliness in My Human Comedy, what passion there is is for playful words, the play of words, the layering and combining of images into still-life vignettes. A central figure in these poems is even named Stan Still, a pun of a name, a symbol for the stillness born of the end of striving. Many of the central symbols are familiar - wind, rain, crows, slowpitch softball, a pickup game of hockey, a teacher's relationship to his students, a father's feelings for his son and daughters. Many poems refer to poets, and poetry, and the art of writing. In the end, lines from the hockey poem "Before Dark" sum things up nicely: Everyone hollers for the last shot/and here it is, no, nowhere near the goal/which after all cannot be seen./No goals let's just keep playing/and there's another rush.
Approaching from bibliographical, literary, cultural, and intercultural perspectives, this book establishes the importance of Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden, a largely unexplored manuscript commonplace book to early modern English literature and culture in general. Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden is a seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace book known primarily for its Shakespearean connections, which extracts works by dozens of early modern English authors, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Milton. This book sheds light on the broader significance of Hesperides that refashions our full knowledge of early modern authorship and plagiarism, composition, reading practice, ...
How did five twentieth-century British authors, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Dorothy L. Sayers, along with their mentors George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton, come to contribute more to the intellect and imagination of millions than many of their literary contemporaries put together? How do their achievements continue to inform and potentially transform us in the twenty-first century? In this first collection of its kind, addressing the entire famous group of seven authors, the twenty-seven chapters in The Inklings and Culture explore the legacy of their diverse literary art—inspired by the Christian faith—art that continues to speak hope into a hurting and deeply divided world.
The most recent installment of the Reappraisals series, which examines the range of meanings associated with animals in the Canadian literary imagination.