Augustine and Literature

Robert P. Kennedy is Chair of the Religious Studies Department at St. Francis Xavier University. Kim Paffenroth is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Iona College. John Doody is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at Villanova University.

Augustine famously criticized the seductive charms of fiction, yet demonstrated his own mastery of story telling in the service of truth. In Augustine and Literature, some of our most nimble scholarly minds take up this paradox in a collection of essays which traces Augustinian themes in familiar places—the works of Dante, the Metaphysical Poets, Milton, and Flannery O'Connor—as well as among authors as diverse and unexpected as Shakespeare, Goethe, Faulkner, Rimbaud, and Ellison. Some essays explore direct Augustinian influences; others expose Augustinian affinities which cast these literary works in a sharper, provocative relief. Thoughtful and often surprising, the volume is rich with literary and theological insights which force us to think about the fundamental elements of the human condition as they bring Augustine into conversation with a host of sympathetic and contrary minds. Together the essays also initiate a broader conversation which goes beyond Augustine's thought and legacy to explore the place of literature in the intellectual life and the life well lived. Students of philosophy and theology, literature, and of the world of the imagination more generally will want to immerse themselves in this volume, and then return, refreshed and

• Chapter 1 IntroductionPart 2 Literature to the Sixteenth CenturyChapter 3 The Weight of Love: Augustinian Metaphors of Movement in Dante's SoulsChapter 4 "Se ponne pisne Wealsteal Wise Gepohte": An Augustinian Reading of the Early English Meditation "The Wanderer"Chapter 5 "There's a Divinity That Shapes Our Ends": An Augustinian Reading of HamletPart 6 Literature of the Seventeenth CenturyChapter 7 St. Augustine and the Metaphysical PoetsChapter 8 Eloquence for the Age of Enlightenment: Fénelon's Saint AugustineChapter 9 Justifying the Ways of God and Man: Theodicy in Augustine and MiltonPart 10 Nineteenth Century LiteratureChapter 11 The Senescence of the World: Augustine's Idea of History and Ibsen's Emperor and GalileanChapter 12 "Descend That You May Ascend": Augustine, Dostoevsky, and the Confessions of Ivan KaramazovChapter 13 "Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me": Eucharist and the Erotic Body in Christina Rossetti's Goblin MarketChapter 14 "Words, Those Precious Cups of Meaning": Augustine's Influence on the Thought and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.Chapter 15 A Season in Hell, or the Confessions of Arthur RimbaudChapter 16 Feminine Wisdom in Augustine and Goethe's FaustPart 17 Twentieth Century LiteratureChapter 18 Faulkner's Augustinian Sense of TimeChapter 19 Augustinian Physicality and the Rhetoric of the Grotesque in the Art of Flannery O'ConnorChapter 20 Marking the Frontiers of World War II with "Stabilized Disorder": Rebecca West Reads St. AugustineChapter 21 Confessional Ethics in Augustine and Ralph Ellison