Innocence Uncovered

Elizabeth S. Dodd completed her doctorate on Thomas Traherne’s poetics of innocence at Cambridge University, under the supervision of Professor David Ford, and published it as Boundless Innocence in Thomas Traherne’s Poetic Theology (2015), along with a collection of essays on Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth-Century Thought with Cassandra Gorman (2016). Her research interests lie in area of theological aesthetics, and she is currently working on a monograph on the lyric voice in English theology. She lectures in theology, imagination and culture and in the ministry programmes at Sarum College in Salisbury, and is programme leader for the ministry MA.Carl E. Findley III received his Ph.D. from The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at The University of Chicago. His research and publications (including works on Robert Musil, Dostoevsky, and Schiller) explore the labile borders that ideas traverse, probing diverse literary traditions and the translation of theoretical forms into avant-garde literary practices. Findley’s work interrogates the relationship between ideas and bodies, and the aesthetic and ethical possibilities from the collapse of intellectual praxis, religious paradigms, and gendered realities in 19th and 20th Century Austrian, German, Russian, and American novels. He is currently Lecturer of Liberal Arts at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.

"'What, then, is innocence?' The question echoes that of Augustine on time, and there are no quick and easy answers. Yet the essays in this book, as an exemplary exercise in the interdisciplinary study of literature and religion, offer a rich and challenging response to that question. Beginning with the Bible, they engage with the problem of innocence though a range of literary texts that recover or explore the scriptural and historical roots of the idea of innocence that are too often forgotten in Christian theology. Rooted in these literary texts the book is aglow with theological and imaginative insights." - David Jasper, Professor of Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow"While the best work in theology, the arts, and the humanities has long recognized the complexity of innocence, there have been too many occasions in which the concept has been idealized, distorted or dismissed. The last of these responses has been especially common in recent years, with scholars seeming to fear that an interest in innocence might risk the accusation of academic naivety. But as this rich and insightful collection makes clear, innocence can be thought about in all sorts of fruitful ways and deserves our sustained attention. With a careful eye to matters of form, history and theology, the contributors assembled here do a wonderful job of helping us to realize why the concept of innocence has the rich history it does, and why it deserves to be thought about anew. This is an important and rewarding collection." - Mark Knight, Lancaster University

• Introduction Carl E. Findley III1 Affirmation and Negation: The Semantic Paradox at the Heart of InnocenceElizabeth S. Dodd2 The Innocence of George MacdonaldJohn de Jong3 The Seduction of Innocence: Erotic Aesthetics from Kierkegaard to Decadentism Michael Subialka4 The Repentance of Language: Geoffrey Hill, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Poetic IntegrityDevon Abts5 Imaginative Innocence and Conscious Utopia in Robert Musil’s The Man Without QualitiesCarl E. Findley III6 The Innocences of Revolution: Failed Utopias and Nostalgic Longings in Evgenii Zamyatin's We and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Heart of a DogChristopher Carr7 A.I. – Artificial Intelligence: Genealogies of the Posthuman ChildRobert A. Davis8 Can There Be Innocence After Failure?Ben Quash9 Moral Innocence as the Negative Counterpart to Moral MaturityZachary J. GoldbergAfterword Elizabeth S. Dodd and Carl E. Findley III