Sublimer Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology

by Natasha Duquette (editor)

How did eighteenth-century aesthetics come to so strongly influence not only the theology but also the practice of Christianity by the late nineteenth century? The twelve essays in Sublimer Aspects seek to answer this question by examining interfaces between literature, aesthetics, and theology from 1715-1885. In doing so, they consider the theological import of canonical writers such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Voltaire, and Immanuel Kant as well as writers whose work is now experiencing a revival, namely women writers including Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, Anne Brontë, Frances Ridley Havergal, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Adelaide Procter. The volume concludes with essays on the possibility for hope within the Christian Romanticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle and George MacDonald, whose texts continue to cultivate a sense of wonder in new generations. Divided into five sections, essays by Ben Faber, Katherine Quinsey, Melora G. Vandersluis, Richard J. Lane, Natasha Duquette, Susan R. Bauman, Krista Lysack, Sandra Hagan, Roxanne Harde, Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, Franceen Neufeld, and Monika Hilder address mutually interdependent connections between providence and grace, sublimity and ethics, gender and hymnody, literature and activism, and finally, aesthetics and hope. 'With topics ranging from Daniel Defoe to Jacques Derrida, this book shows the reach and the long-standing importance of the aesthetics of the sublime. Natasha Duquette has assembled a plurality of voices in a fascinating mix of essays that provide a chronological study of the shifting representations of the sublime in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. The religious and the Biblical sublime are well represented, in addition to secular manifestations of the sublime, even, as one author describes, in a movement from the aspiration of the Gothic spire to the madness of subterranean dungeons. These scrupulously researched and well-written essays include analysis of Alexander Pope s brilliant satires and Anne Brontë s tenacious hymns, a rich range of material that will appeal to a wide audience.' Deborah Kennedy, Saint Mary s University author of Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution

240 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2007