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"Christianity History Fiction."
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Stormbringers
Luca and Isolde continue their journey searching for evil in medieval Christenndom.
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If God Meant to Interfere
The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. InIf God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields.
Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right's strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism -leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms \"Christian multiculturalism\" and \"Christian postmodernism.\" Ultimately,If God Meant to Interfereshows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.
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The Shadow of Creusa
Anders Cullhed's study The Shadow of Creusa explores the early Christian confrontation with pagan culture as a remote anticipation of many later clashes between religious orthodoxy and literary fictionality. After a careful survey of Saint Augustine's critical attitudes to ancient myth and poetry, summarized as a long drawn-out farewell, Cullhed examines other Late Antique dismissals as well as appropriations of the classical heritage. Macrobius, Martianus Capella and Boethius figure among the Late Antique intellectuals who attempted to save or even restore the old mythology by means of allegorical representation. On the other hand, pious poets such as Paulinus of Nola and Bible epic writers such as Iuvencus or Avitus of Vienne turned against pagan lies, and the mighty arch-bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose, played off unconditional Christian truth against the last Roman strongholds of cultural pluralism. Thus, The Shadow of Creusa elucidates a cultural conflict which was to leave traces all through the Middle Ages and reach down to our present day.
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Fools' gold
Tasked to expose a coin counterfeiting scheme, Luca and Isolde, whose romantic attraction continues to grow, travel to Venice in 1454, where they meet an alchemist who plans to create the Philosopher's Stone, a mystical substance said to be capable of turning base metals into gold and producing the elixir of life.
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Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction
David J. Leigh explores the innovative influences of the Book of
Revelation and ideas of an end time on fiction of the twentieth
century, and probes philosophical, political, and theological
issues raised by apocalyptic writers from Walker Percy, C. S.
Lewis, and Charles Williams to Doris Lessing, Thomas Pynchon, Don
DeLillo.
Leigh tackles head on a fundamental question about
Christian-inspired eschatology: Does it sanction, as theologically
sacred or philosophically ultimate, the kind of \"last battles\"
between good and evil that provoke human beings to demonize and
destroy the other? Against the backdrop of this question, Leigh
examines twenty modern and postmodern apocalyptic novels,
juxtaposing them in ways that expose a new understanding of each.
The novels are clustered for analysis in chapters that follow seven
basic eschatological patterns-the last days imagined as an ultimate
journey, a cosmic battle, a transformed self, an ultimate
challenge, the organic union of human and divine, the new heaven
and new earth, and the ultimate way of religious pluralism.
For religious novelists, these patterns point toward spiritual
possibilities in the final days of human life or of the universe.
For more political novelists-Ralph Ellison, Russell Hoban, and
Salman Rushdie among them-the patterns are used to critique
political or social movements of self-destruction. Beyond the
twenty novels closely analyzed, Leigh makes pertinent reference to
many more as well as to reflections from theologians Jürgen
Moltmann, Zachary Hayes, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Paul Ricoeur.
Both a guidebook and a critical assessment, Leigh's work brings
theological concepts to bear on end-of-the-world fiction in an
admirably clear and accessible manner.
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Victorian Reformations : Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900
\"In Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein analyzes the ways in which Christian novelists across the denominational spectrum laid claim to popular genres--most importantly, the religious historical novel--to narrate the aftershocks of 1829, the year of Catholic Emancipation. Both Protestant and Catholic popular novelists fought over the ramifications of nineteenth-century Catholic toleration for the legacy of the Reformation. But despite the vast textual range of this genre, it remains virtually unknown in literary studies. Victorian Reformations is the first book to analyze how \"high\" theological and historical debates over the Reformation's significance were popularized through the increasingly profitable venue of Victorian religious fiction. By putting religious apologists and controversialists at center stage, Burstein insists that such fiction--frequently dismissed as overly simplistic or didactic--is essential for our understanding of Victorian popular theology, history, and historical novels. Burstein reads \"lost\" but once exceptionally popular religious novels--for example, by Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, and Emily Sarah Holt--against the works of such now-canonical figures as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, while also drawing on material from contemporary sermons, histories, and periodicals. Burstein demonstrates how these novels, which popularized Christian visions of change for a mass readership, call into question our assumptions about the nineteenth-century historical novel. In addition, her research and her conceptual frameworks have the potential to influence broader paradigms in Victorian studies and novel criticism. \"In Victorian Reformations, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein persuasively shows how non-canonical Victorian historical novels offer essential insights into the shaping and importance of Victorian religious debates. Informative and well-argued, her book is a significant work for those who are interested in Victorian literature and Victorian religion, as well as the intersection of the two.\"--Carol Engelhardt Herringer, Wright State University\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Resisting the marriage plot : faith and female agency in Austen, Brontë, Gaskell, and Wollstonecraft
\"I cannot suppose any situation more distressing than for a woman of sensibility with an improving mind to be bound to such a man as I have described.\"
Mary Wollstonecraft's response to one of her early critics points to the fact that fiction has long been employed by authors to cast a vision for social change. Less acknowledged, however, has been the role of the Christian faith in such works.
In this Studies in Theology and the Arts volume, literary scholar Dalene Joy Fisher explores the work of four beloved female novelists: Jane Austen, Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Each of these authors, she argues, appealed to the Christian faith through their heroines to challenge cultural expectations regarding women, especially in terms of marriage. Although Christianity has all too often been used to oppress women, Fisher demonstrates that in the hands of these novelists and through the actions of their characters, it could also be a transformative force to liberate women.
The Studies in Theology and the Arts? series encourages Christians to thoughtfully engage with the relationship between their faith and artistic expression, with contributions from both theologians and artists on a range of artistic media including visual art, music, poetry, literature, film, and more.
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If God meant to interfere : American literature and the rise of the Christian right
\"Proposes to solve the question of how contemporary American literature has registered--or has failed to register--what is one of the most important cultural paradigm shifts of the postwar period, the astonishing expansion and empowerment of fundamentalist and conservative evangelical and Christianity in the United States\"-- Author's university Web page.
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Science Fiction Theology
Science fiction imagines a universe teeming with life and thrilling possibility, but also hidden and hideous dangers. Christian theology, often a polemical target for science fiction, reflects on the plenitude out of which and for which the universe exists. In Science Fiction Theology , Alan Gregory investigates the troubled relationship between science fiction and Christianity and, in particular, how both have laid claim to the modern idea of sublimity.
To the extent that science fiction has appropriated—and reveled—in the sublime, it has persisted in a sometimes explicit, sometimes subterranean, relationship with Christian theology. From its seventeenth-century beginnings, the sublime, with its representations of immensity, has informed the imagining of God. When science fiction critiques or reinvents religion, its writers have engaged in a literary guerrilla war with Christianity over what is truly sublime and divine.
Gregory examines the sublime and its implicit theologies as they appear in early American pulp science fiction, the horror writing of H. P. Lovecraft, science fiction narratives of evolution and apocalypse, and the work of Philip K. Dick. Ironically, science fiction’s tussle with Christianity hides the extent to which the sublime, especially in popular culture, serves to distort the classical Christian understanding of God, secularizing that God and rendering God’s transcendence finite. But by turning from the sublime to a consideration of the beautiful, Gregory shows that both Christian and science-fictional imaginations may discover a new and surprising conversation.
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