Mark Knight – författare

Recent scholarship in nineteenth-century literary studies consistently recognizes the profound importance of religion, even as it marginalizes the topic. There are few, if any, challenging yet manageable introductions to religion and literature in the long-nineteenth century, a factor that serves to fuel scholars' neglect of theological issues. This book aims to show how religion, specifically Christianity, is integral to the literature and culture of this period. It provides close readings of popular texts and integrates these with accessible explanations of complex religious ideas. Written by two scholars who have published widely on religion and literature, the book offers a detailed grounding in the main religious movements of the period 1750-1914. The dominant traditions of High Anglicanism, Tractarianism, Evangelicalism, and Roman Catholicism are contextualized by preceding chapters addressing dissenting culture (primarily Presbyterianism, Methodism, Unitarianism andQuakerism), and the question of secularization is considered in the light of the diversity and capacity for renewal within the Christian faith. Throughout the book the authors untangle theological and church debates in a manner that highlights the privileged relationship between religion and literature in the period. The book also gives readers a language to approach and articulate their own "religious" readings of texts, texts that are often concerned with slippery subjects, such as the divine, the non-material and the nature of religious experience. Refusing to shut down religious debate by offering only narrow or fixed definitions of Christian traditions, the book also questions the demarcation of sacred material from secular, as well as connecting the vitality of religion in the period to a broader literary culture.

Recent scholarship in nineteenth-century literary studies consistently recognizes the profound importance of religion, even as it marginalizes the topic. There are few, if any, challenging yet manageable introductions to religion and literature in the long-nineteenth century, a factor that serves to fuel scholars' neglect of theological issues. This book aims to show how religion, specifically Christianity, is integral to the literature and culture of this period. It provides close readings of popular texts and integrates these with accessible explanations of complex religious ideas. Written by two scholars who have published widely on religion and literature, the book offers a detailed grounding in the main religious movements of the period 1750-1914. The dominant traditions of High Anglicanism, Tractarianism, Evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism are contextualized by preceding chapters addressing dissenting culture (primarily Presbyterianism, Methodism, Unitarianism and Quakerism), and the question of secularization is considered in the light of the diversity and capacity for renewal within the Christian faith. Throughout the book the authors untangle theological and church debates in a manner that highlights the privileged relationship between religion and literature in the period. The book also gives readers a language to approach and articulate their own 'religious' readings of texts, texts that are often concerned with slippery subjects such as the divine, the non-material and the nature of religious experience. Refusing to shut down religious debate by offering only narrow or fixed definitions of Christian traditions, the book also questions the demarcation of sacred material from secular, as well as connecting the vitality of religion in the period to a broader literary culture.

This unique and comprehensive volume looks at the study of literature and religion from a contemporary, critical perspective. Including discussion of global literature and world religions, this Companion looks at:key moments in the story of religion and literary studies from Matthew Arnold through to the impact of 9/11;a variety of theoretical approaches to the study of religion and literature;different ways that religion and literature are connected, from overtly religious writing to subtle religious readings;analysis of key sacred texts and the way they have been studied, re-written, and questioned by literature;political implications of work on religion and literature.Thoroughly introduced and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this huge and complex field.

This book traces the emergence and development of Literature and the Bible as a field of scholarship, presenting key critical essays alongside more recent criticism that explores new directions. The Western literary tradition has a long and complex relationship with the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Authors draw on the Bible in numerous ways and for different reasons, and there is also the myriad of subconscious ways through which the biblical text enters literary culture. Biblical stories, characters, motifs and references permeate the whole of the literary tradition.In the last thirty years there has been a growth of critical interest in this relationship. In Literature and the Bible: A Reader the editors bring together a selection of the key critical and theoretical materials from this time, providing a comprehensive resource for students and scholars.Each chapter contains:• An introduction from the editors, contextualising the material within and alerting readers to some of the historic debates that feed into the extracts chosen• A set of previously published extracts of substantial length, offering greater contextualisation and allowing the Reader to be used flexibly• Lists of further reading, providing readers with a wide variety of other sources and perspectives.Designed to be used alongside the Bible and selected literary texts, this book is essential reading for anyone studying Literature and the Bible in undergraduate English, Religion and Theology degrees.

This book traces the emergence and development of Literature and the Bible as a field of scholarship, presenting key critical essays alongside more recent criticism that explores new directions. The Western literary tradition has a long and complex relationship with the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Authors draw on the Bible in numerous ways and for different reasons, and there is also the myriad of subconscious ways through which the biblical text enters literary culture. Biblical stories, characters, motifs and references permeate the whole of the literary tradition.In the last thirty years there has been a growth of critical interest in this relationship. In Literature and the Bible: A Reader the editors bring together a selection of the key critical and theoretical materials from this time, providing a comprehensive resource for students and scholars.Each chapter contains:• An introduction from the editors, contextualising the material within and alerting readers to some of the historic debates that feed into the extracts chosen• A set of previously published extracts of substantial length, offering greater contextualisation and allowing the Reader to be used flexibly• Lists of further reading, providing readers with a wide variety of other sources and perspectives.Designed to be used alongside the Bible and selected literary texts, this book is essential reading for anyone studying Literature and the Bible in undergraduate English, Religion and Theology degrees.

This unique and comprehensive volume looks at the study of literature and religion from a contemporary critical perspective. Including discussion of global literature and world religions, this Companion looks at:Key moments in the story of religion and literary studies from Matthew Arnold through to the impact of 9/11A variety of theoretical approaches to the study of religion and literatureDifferent ways that religion and literature are connected from overtly religious writing, to subtle religious readingsAnalysis of key sacred texts and the way they have been studied, re-written, and questioned by literaturePolitical implications of work on religion and literatureThoroughly introduced and contextualised, this volume is an engaging introduction to this huge and complex field.

In the engaging Chesterton and Evil, Mark Knight offers a compelling analysis of the increasingly marginalized, but undoubtedly influential Gilbert Keith Chesterton and his late 19th and early 20th century fiction. In his Autobiography Chesterton observed: "Perhaps, when I eventually emerged as a sort of theorist, and was described as an Optimist, it was because I was one of the few people in that world of diabolism who really believed in devils." Arguing that a serious analysis of the nature of evil is at the center of his fiction, Chesterton and Evil offers an exciting, new interdisciplinary reading of Chesterton's work, and provides a means of locating it among important theological and cultural concerns of his age.

Organised around important theological ideas this is a lucid, accessible and thoughtful introduction to the study of literature and religion. Religion has always been an integral part of the literary tradition: many canonical and non-canonical texts engage extensively with religious ideas and the development of English Literature as a professional discipline began with an explicit consideration of the relationship between religion and literature. Both the recent theological turn of literary theory and the renewed political significance of religious debate in contemporary western culture have generated further interest in this interdisciplinary area.This book offers a lucid, accessible and thoughtful introduction to the study of religion and literature. The focus is on Christian theology and post-1800 British literature, although substantial reference is made to earlier writers, texts from North America and mainland Europe, and other faith positions."An Introduction to Religion and Literature" is organised around important theological ideas, each of which is explored through close readings of well-known and influential literary texts.Throughout the book the reader is encouraged to think about the ways in which religion and literature combine to trace and disclose other worlds that might be seen as sacred.

Organised around important theological ideas, this is a lucid, accessible and thoughtful introduction to the study of literature and religion. Religion has always been an integral part of the literary tradition: many canonical and non-canonical texts engage extensively with religious ideas and the development of English Literature as a professional discipline began with an explicit consideration of the relationship between religion and literature. Both the recent theological turn of literary theory and the renewed political significance of religious debate in contemporary western culture have generated further interest in this interdisciplinary area.This book offers a lucid, accessible and thoughtful introduction to the study of religion and literature. The focus is on Christian theology and post-1800 British literature, although substantial reference is made to earlier writers, texts from North America and mainland Europe, and other faith positions."An Introduction to Religion and Literature" is organised around important theological ideas, each of which is explored through close readings of well-known and influential literary texts.Throughout the book the reader is encouraged to think about the ways in which religion and literature combine to trace and disclose other worlds that might be seen as sacred.

Five 'sensation' novels are here presented complete and fully reset, along with scholarly annotation, a bibliography of 'sensation' fiction and articles contributing to contemporary debate.

Five 'sensation' novels are here presented complete and fully reset, along with scholarly annotation, a bibliography of 'sensation' fiction and articles contributing to contemporary debate.

Five 'sensation' novels are here presented complete and fully reset, along with scholarly annotation, a bibliography of 'sensation' fiction and articles contributing to contemporary debate.

Five 'sensation' novels are here presented complete and fully reset, along with scholarly annotation, a bibliography of 'sensation' fiction and articles contributing to contemporary debate.

Five 'sensation' novels are here presented complete and fully reset, along with scholarly annotation, a bibliography of 'sensation' fiction and articles contributing to contemporary debate.

Five 'sensation' novels are here presented complete and fully reset, along with scholarly annotation, a bibliography of 'sensation' fiction and articles contributing to contemporary debate.

This rhetorical study of the persuasive practice of English Puritan preachers and writers demonstrates how they appeal to both reason and imagination in order to persuade their hearers and readers towards conversion, assurance of salvation and godly living. Examining works from a diverse range of preacher-writers such as William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, Richard Baxter and John Bunyan, this book maps out continuities and contrasts in the theory and practice of persuasion.Tracing the emergence of Puritan allegory as an alternative, imaginative mode of rhetoric, it sheds new light on the paradoxical question of how allegories such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress came to be among the most significant contributions of Puritanism to the English literary canon, despite the suspicions of allegory and imagination that were endemic in Puritan culture. Concluding with reflections on how Milton deploys similar strategies to persuade his readers towards his idiosyncratic brand of godly faith, this book makes an original contribution to current scholarly conversations around the textual culture of Puritanism, the history of rhetoric, and the rhetorical character of theology.

In the 19th century, an era that saw a reconfiguration of the relationship between the self, the world and the divine, women writers probed the theological depths of embodied faith in new ways through poetry, fiction, devotional prose and life writing.Elizabeth Ludlow explores how, through this process, they articulated what it means to pray, and thereby understand one’s place in a world of individual and communal bodies. The eight women writers discussed – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Josephine Butler, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dora Greenwell, Felicia Hemans, Adelaide Procter and Christina Rossetti – provide accounts of prayer that stress that the only way to experience and respond to something of the transcendent is through embracing lived experience and through a recognition of the connectedness of all bodies.In detailing how these writers engage with new ways of thinking about faith, desire and the material world, Ludlow argues that they offer models for ethical modes of being in the world and pave the way for later theologies of embodiment.

Exploring how Shusaku Endo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thomas Merton, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, and Octavia E. Butler engage with social justice and activism, this book explores the significant role that literature plays in the formation of justice. Jeff Keuss foregrounds literature and the role of poetics as both a method and a frame by which justice can not only be understood but uniquely positioned to transform and redeem the moral call on individuals in ways that some recent philosophical and ethical projects do not. He examines how these authors are representative of a theme in literature which is the “turn to justice” as a literary form and discusses how these authors’ engagement with activism challenges isolated and anxious models of contemporary selfhood. Demonstrating how these writers utilize fiction, across different contexts of race, gender, culture, and theological denominations, to present themes of justice in communion with others, Keuss provides new insights into “communal selfhood” and shows how we can use this idea to shape our ideas of ethics, morality, activism, and justice.

With the arrival of Puritan settlers in New England in the middle decades of the 17th-century, accounts of sickness, colonial violence, and painful religious transformation quickly emerged, enabling new forms of testimonial writing in prose and poetry. Investigating a broad transatlantic archive of religious literature, historical medical science, and philosophies of sensation, this book explores how Puritan America contemplated pain and ascribed meaning to it in writing.By weaving the experience of pained bodies into popular public discourse, Hardy shows how Puritans imagined the pained Christian body, whilst simultaneously marginalizing and vilifying those who expressed suffering by different measures, including Indigenous Americans and unorthodox colonists. Focusing on pain as it emerged from spaces of inchoate settlement and colonial violence, he provides new understandings of early American nationalism and connected racial tropes which persist today.

Demonstrating how Chaucer uses the Bible in The Canterbury Tales as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production, this book explores the ways in which the Bible was a key tool for Chaucer's self-definition and innovation as an author.Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer’s Tales in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority, textuality, interpretation, translation, rephrasing and marginalia. When the Canterbury Tales are summed up in this way, they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry – its fictional tale-tellers and characters, its quotations, allusions and images, its plots, its imaginative engagement with an audience of listeners and readers, and its hidden intentions.Schrock demonstrates that the Bible is a uniquely potent literary source for Chaucer because it combines infinite authority and plenitude with unprecedented freedom of interpretive invention. As a world-making text, the Bible’s authority includes the literary as subcategory but surpasses and contextualizes it, which gives Chaucer’s deferential biblical invention a different kind of freedom and safety. Within Chaucer’s tales, a biblical image is often where a given narrative peaks and its plot comes clear, but a biblical world also and without strain contains his biblical fictioneers and whatever they make from the Bible, whether orthodoxy or heresy, whether sin or worship.

Choice 2025 Outstanding Academic TitleExamining what the eucharist taught early modern writers about their bodies and how it shaped the bodies they wrote about, this book shows how the exegetical roots of the Eucharistic controversy in 16th century England had very material and embodied consequences.To apprehend the nature of Christ’s body—its nature, presence, closeness, and efficacy—for these writers, was also to understand one’s own. And conversely, to know one’s own body was to know something particular about Christ’s.Sandberg provides new insights into how Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Aemilia Lanyer use the reformed eucharistic paradigm to imagine the embodied significance of the sacrament for their own bodies, the bodies of their narrative subjects, and the body of their literary work. She shows the significance of this paradigm was for poets and playwrights at this time to represent the embodied self and negotiate how the body was read, interpreted and understood.

Using Wordsworth as a focal point, this book describes how, in the period of Romanticism and beyond, the historical practice of pilgrimage became internalised figuratively and psychologically so as to represent Christian discourse in nineteenth-century English literature.It surveys the imaginative relocation of Jerusalem and Rome to real and present places, thereby creating the nation’s sacred imaginary. Wordsworth is presented as central to founding a literary religious discourse on the sacred site of the Lake District. Also explored are the ways in which other Victorian writers such as Ruskin and Newman participated in that construction by their own literary pilgrimages.Overall, this book revises assumptions about the decline of the religious imagination in nineteenth-century English literature and fundamentally reappraises the function of Romantic and Victorian representations of the sacred in forming the nation and empire.

Exploring nine works of contemporary feminist speculative fiction by Rhoda Lerman, Angela Carter, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman, this book asks how biblical myths of creation and apocalypse can intensify characters’ emotions or distract them from dealing with the more immediate problems presented by climate crisis, conflict, social inequality and other distressing realities.Engaging with affect theory – the study of emotion – across feminist, womanist and queer biblical reception history, this book argues that certain myths can become, in the words of Sara Ahmed, 'sticky', attaching themselves (and their associated emotions) to certain people, stories or ideas. It asks how and why these stories 'stick', and how this can shine a light on the societies reflected in the novels as they respond to debates within the feminism(s) of their time. The book takes negative emotions such as rage, loneliness, depression and disgust, and explores how these operate on and through fictional characters, who in many cases cannot escape the pull of Eden or the push of apocalypse. These novels impel the reader to identify moments in which such characters may (or may not) 'stay with the trouble', as Donna Haraway would put it, rather than giving in to the seductive dream of beginning afresh.

The study of religion and literature continues to go from strength to strength - this collection of essays offers a dynamic, lively and provocative contribution to the field and aims to map out new directions it might take. By returning to foundational questions regarding the relation between words and worlds and the parameters of the sacred, the essays explore different ways of using interdisciplinary resources to open up our understanding of religion and literature. Contributions from some of the leading voices in the field unite to offer an important exploration of the possible worlds that the study of religion and literature imagines.