Subject Guide: Literature

Essays on film and contemporary artists and theology read through and in literature.

Explores the Bible's role and influence on individual writers, whilst tracing the key developments of Biblical themes and literary theory through the ages.

Gathers together writings drawn from 2000 years of Christian history.

Seeks to answer the question, "What has Jesus Christ to do with English literature?"

Offers a systematic account of Christian literature between AD 100-400 and its setting.

First encyclopedia devoted to Christian writers and books.

Focuses on Christian theology and post-1800 British literature, but also refers to earlier writers, texts from North America and mainland Europe, and other faith positions.

Seeks to bring to light the vital role that religion has played in the literature of the U.S.

Seeks to define and explain the archetypal pattern of redemption that underlies our whole notion of resolution in literature and to demonstrate, through multiple examples, that successful literature uses this pattern in specific ways.

States the case for a contemporary literary theory whose principles derive from Christian theology.

Offers essays for Christian wayfaring.

Presents the 25 most spiritually influential and important books for Christians to read.

Organizes Greco-Roman, Jewish, and pagan primary sources relevant to the New Testament into a comprehensible and manageable format, and points scholars to both the primary sources and the important secondary literature on these texts.

Examines contemporary art and literature that grapple with the perennial questions of religious faith from Image journal.

Covers over 14,000 titles of some classics, but mostly published between late 1999 and 2003.

Examines the ways in which Catholic writers between the reigns of Mary Tudor and James I fashioned their own competing discourses of national and cultural identity.

Demonstrates the effects of the word-centeredness of the Tudor-Stuart Church of England on the literature produced during and immediately after the reigns of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts.

Study of the Roman Catholic, Japanese novelist Endo Shusaku who combined western and Japanese religious, theological and philosophical thought.

Provides a student resource to understand the tradition of Christianity in English literature.

Examines the relationship between the Christianity of the medieval world and romance.

This book links the concepts of patriotism, Christianity, and nationhood in the journalistic writings of G.K. Chesterton.

Focuses on the critically neglected area of Rossetti's devotional poetry and her prose.

Hill's criticism of poets (including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins, Whitman, Eliot, and Yeats ) and prose writers (such as Tyndale, Clarendon, Hobbes, Burton, Emerson, and F. H. Bradley).

Covers important topics in the study of literature and film adaptations and the relationship between world literature and film.

Uses the study of the writings of men and women in the 17th century to argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political sphere shaped their relation to it.

Gives readers the opportunity to listen in on the author's thoughtful conversations with ten contemporary writers,
especially for what they say about "wrestling with the sacred" in their writing.

Introduces the literature of early monasticism.

Approaches the thought of three colonial New England divines--Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Edward Taylor--from the perspective of literary theory.

Includes earliest Christian works from the 1st to the beginnings of the medieval period along with respected contemporary writings.

Presents the earliest Christian writings in a historically meaningful order and includes writings similar in age and historical importance to the books of the New Testament.

Organizes over 600 titles into subject categories ranging from biography, the arts, and education, to theology, devotion, and spiritual warfare.

Explores the roles that women played in the production, reproduction, and dissemination of early Christian books, and how the representation of female characters was contested through the medium of writing and copying.

Argues for the life-long influence of Catholicism on Greene's literary works.

A journey through 2 1/2 millennia of classical books as powerful, thrilling, erotic, politically astute, and awe-inspiring as any modern bestseller.

Includes excerpts from 30 of the greatest works in western literature and essays about those works written by distinguished professors, lecturers, and authors.

Equips readers to become better writers by introducing quality writing with over 60 classic and contemporary selections from numerous writers.

Brings words from some of the brilliant women who have been the revealers of their times, from a 9th-century mother in France writing a poignant self-help book for the son from whom she is separated, to a modern-day social campaigner in New York.

Seeks to bring to light the vital role that religion has played in the literature of the U.S.

Offers a theology for reading and practical suggestions for reading widely, reading well, and for making it all worthwhile.

Profiles the censorship of many essential works of literature.

Argues that the religious import of American environmental literature have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source of "something that takes us out of ourselves."

Covers over 500 classic and contemporary works of Christian fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, providing a plot summary, analysis of Christian themes, and an annotated bibliography for each title.

Asks why these ancient divisions between Catholics and Protestants were so deep, why they continued into the 19th century and how novelists and poets, theologians and preachers, historians and essayists reinterpreted the religious debates.

Explores the interrelation of religion, cultural identity, politics, literature, myth, and memory by focusing on the cultural dynamics embedded in and surrounding Philostratus’s Heroikos, an early third-century C.E. dialogue about Homer and the heroes of the Trojan War.

Explores apocalyptic literature and seeks to understand why American evangelicals find the idea of the rapture so compelling.

Systematically grounds Augustine's theological reception in the history of reading and the material culture of books and manuscripts, offers a cross-confessional account of Augustine's appropriation in early modern Europe, and and provides crucial insight into the nature of intellectual authority in the early modern period.

Introduces the reader to the primary sources of Church history with commentary.

Helps the reader see God everywhere especially in things they read.

Explains the ways both regional and religious contexts inform the production, circulation and interpretation of Renaissance literary texts.

Develops a history of literacy between the middle of the 16th century and the middle of the 17th century by focusing on how Protestant and Catholic paradigms of the Word affect the understanding of how meaning manifests itself in language.

Uses literature and culture to show how anti-Catholic sentiment particularly shaped U.S. conceptions of pluralism and its relationship to diverse issues in society.

Explores a broad range of writings on spirituality in contemporary Japanese literature.

Presents a vibrant, complex picture of the role that religion plays in shaping and defining Latino/a identity through literature.

Shows us that in most instances style and faith remain apart, but that when the two are in accord the work are are witnesses against the enemies of truth.

Explores the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the 18th century.

Explores the place of faith in the lives of writers who wrote after Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential 1837 call to establish a national literary culture free from "the learning of other lands."

Addresses the ways literature and theory have engaged with literary criticism, philosophy, and history and related concerns.

Uses pairings of key writers and painters to track the varied meanings of the self in America.

Offers essays for Christian wayfaring.

Examines Wendell Berry's main themes of community, place, and conservation in his writings

Explores Dostoevsky's critique and exploitation of the jury trial for his own ideological agenda, both in his journalism and his fiction, contextualizing his portrayal of trials and trial participants in the political, social, and ideological milieu of his time.

Engages the field of Gospel studies over the last hundred years, arguing convincingly for viewing the Gospels as biographical documents of the sort common throughout the Graeco-Roman world.

Tours nearly 200 bestselling books, ferrets out their persistent themes and determines what those say about what we believe and how we relate to one another.

Offers a window into the soul of American culture and its literary figures.

Contains the great Separatist's solus writings from 1590-1591.

Spans the boundaries between literary studies and history and looks at the impact of tyrannical government on the work of poets, playwrights, and prose writers of the early English Renaissance.

Presents the 25 most spiritually influential and important books for Christians to read.

Provides both background information on and new assessments of Middle English lyrics chapter by chapter according to their kinds.

Conversations with 19 Americas leading poets, reflecting upon their diverse experiences with spirituality and the craft of writing.

Works chronologically through the entire text of Piers Plowman and is designed to be read alongside it.

Offers the idea that the modern "crisis of faith" is not a matter of vanishing spiritual concerns and energy but rather of their disorientation, even as they remain pervasive forces in human affairs.

Illuminates the ways in which Elizabeth Bishop's Protestant childhood and reading of Christian literature, coupled with her deep commitment to agnosticism, inform the works of this former poet laureate of the U.S.

Leads the reader on a poetic journey through the birth, life and death of the Jesus the Christ, and finally to the joyous and unexpected wonder of his resurrection.

Weaves a tapestry from the many strands of American religious experience and practice.

Reading guide and selection tool for 12,000 fiction and nonfiction teen titles published from 2001 to 2003

Covers over 14,000 titles of some classics, but mostly published between late 1999 and 2003.

Assesses the complexity and fluidity of Christian identity along with debate about readmission of the Jews in 17th-century England.

Offers an understanding of Christianity's key concepts, themes, images, and characters as they relate to English literature up to the present day.

Focuses on the critically neglected area of Rossetti's devotional poetry and her prose.

Surveys the history of poetics and provides an introduction and brief biography for each reading.

Hill's criticism of poets (including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins, Whitman, Eliot, and Yeats ) and prose writers (such as Tyndale, Clarendon, Hobbes, Burton, Emerson, and F. H. Bradley).

Looks at Prudentius' lyric poems, the Cathemerinon, Poems for the Day, which were published early in the 5th century AD.

Posits new ways of understanding the relations between devotional literature and early modern English culture.

Argues that the origins of passages in the book of Acts are to be found not in early Christian legends but in the epics of Homer.

Pairs full-color reproductions of some of Rembrandt's most powerful religious paintings with finely crafted poems reflecting on them.

John Updike's 6th collection of literary biographies and essays on various topics.

Builds on the themes of Mud, Water, Fire, Air and Text, and explores the intersection of nature and mystery.

Scholarly edition of Herbert's complete English poems, accompanied by extensive explanatory and textual apparatus, a glossary of key words, and an index of biblical quotations.

Examines the relationship between theology, faith, religious history and national politics in the works of Oscar Wilde.

Explores the history of women and feminism throughout literature, from classical antiquity to modern times.

Uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibility of religious experience for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian worship today.

Suggests that graveyard poetry is closely connected to the mid-century aesthetic revision of poetics.

An illuminating, learned, well-written, and entertaining survey of the giants of world literature.

Examines the works by Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound in light of World War 1.

Practical and amusing guide to literature and explores major themes, literary models, narrative devices, and form.

Uncovers the almost unknown influences of humanism on English literature in the 15th century.

Anthology of the best poems published in the journal Christianity and Literature over the past 60 years.

Equips readers to become better writers by introducing quality writing with over 60 classic and contemporary selections from numerous writers.

Seeks to bring to light the vital role that religion has played in the literature of the U.S.

Examines each of Latin epics in detail, showing how the three authors Juvencus, Sedulius, and Arator repackage the New Testament as epic, and try to make a bridge between two very different cultures.

Offers a guide to studying and understanding literature, especially poetry, and an inspiring look at what it means to think like poets and view the world through literary eyes.

Covers over 500 classic and contemporary works of Christian fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, providing a plot summary, analysis of Christian themes, and an annotated bibliography for each title.

Argues that Melville's poem Clarel is actually a study in comparative religion - one that explores faith and doubt in the post-Darwinian age.

Argues that Milton's influence in the 19th century was pervasiveness.

Traces the evolution of what the diaries reveal as Gladstone's central intellectual preoccupations, theology and classical scholarship,as well as the groundwork of his early Conservatism and his mature Liberalism.

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

Asks why these ancient divisions between Catholics and Protestants were so deep, why they continued into the 19th century and how novelists and poets, theologians and preachers, historians and essayists reinterpreted the religious debates.

The Old English poems in this volume are among the first retellings of scriptural texts in a European vernacular.

Applies interdisciplinary approaches to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology.

Treats several important aspects of late 14th-century life: ideological conflict, social upheaval, and the changing role of religious thought.

Demonstrates that all activities are places where God is active in the world.

Restores poetry as the natural language of spiritual practice and invites the reader to recognize poetry as "the pure sound and shape of your spirit."

Shows the astonishing range of poetic encounters with Jesus, with a special emphasis on 20th century poetry.

Studies and compares the poetry of George Herbert and R.S. Thomas.

Celebrates the work of the Welsh poet R S Thomas and illuminates the theological implications of this famous poet-priest's pilgrimage.

Uses various approaches and deals with various texts to show the complexity of Traherne's work by placing it directly within current critical debates and within 16th-century contexts.

Explains the ways both regional and religious contexts inform the production, circulation and interpretation of Renaissance literary texts.

Seeks to find revelation and meaning in everyday life.

Shows us that in most instances style and faith remain apart, but that when the two are in accord the work are are witnesses against the enemies of truth.

Explores the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the 18th century.

Explores the place of faith in the lives of writers who wrote after Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential 1837 call to establish a national literary culture free from "the learning of other lands."

Addresses the ways literature and theory have engaged with literary criticism, philosophy, and history and related concerns.

Recovers many long-neglected but influential writers to paint a complete and authoritative portrait of the era.

Focuses on the work of Mary Sidney Herbert, Lady Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer, Lyn Bennett to show how rhetoric enabled these poets to articulate what the 16th century rhetorician Henry Peacham called 'divine and human things'.

Presents the 25 most spiritually influential and important books for Christians to read.

Conversations with 19 Americas leading poets, reflecting upon their diverse experiences with spirituality and the craft of writing.

Focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne's fiction and its adaptations.

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.

Offers a Catholic monk's take on the Harry Potter series.

Explores the cultural consequences of the rather sudden 19th century emergence of unbelief as a widespread social and intellectual option in the English-speaking world.

Examines the intricate and unusual relationship between the sacred and secular spheres of English medieval culture.

Tours the great literary works of the ages from a Christian perspective.

Reviews and critiques the works of many Christian authors who created mythological stories.

Offers an understanding of Christianity's key concepts, themes, images, and characters as they relate to English literature up to the present day.

Gives a balanced treatment of Tolkien by discussing Christian elements in the Hobbits without finding Christian elements everywhere and introduces a side of Tolkien that is rarely explored but vitally important to his writings.

Great works and authors of the world are introduced and reviewed artistically, intellectually, and theologically.

Argues against the idea that postmodernism has undermined the association between religious practice and literature and suggests that the novel has become an increasingly vital, dynamic and problematic space for engaging with the sacred.

Gives readers the opportunity to listen in on the author's thoughtful conversations with ten contemporary writers,
especially for what they say about "wrestling with the sacred" in their writing.

Contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others.

Covers the six decades since the end of World War II.

Examines Christian literature's place in American culture today and explores the cultural meaning and significance of very popular Christian fiction now available.

Examines the relationship between theology, faith, religious history and national politics in the works of Oscar Wilde.

Examines the specific connections between contemporary cultural meta-narratives (the stories humans typically tell about themselves) and the ideas of hope found in Christianity.

Examines Dickens the Christian and shows how Christian beliefs and practices permeate his work.

Proposes that far from being 'wicked' or 'Satanic,' the Harry Potter books are in fact narratives of robust faith and morality.

Evaluates Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison from an orthodox Christian perspective.

Explores the world of magic and mystery created by J. K. Rowling alongside the stories and grand themes of the Bible.

Argues for the life-long influence of Catholicism on Greene's literary works.

Points out general themes in the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling and matches them to the ancient motifs of the biblical writings.

Shows how the types of character, plot, setting, and symbol that Hawthorne used in his four best known novels were drawn from his reading of the Bible.

Convincingly shows that our best allies in the struggle for more rigorous thinking, deeper faith, richer experience, and greater peace of mind may well be the imaginative writings sitting on our shelves.

Practical and amusing guide to literature and explores major themes, literary models, narrative devices, and form.

Features books from a wide variety of genres-contemporary fiction, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, Westerns, and more-each carrying a Christian message for adults.

Recommends a core collection of Christian fiction for young readers and their families.

Offers a theology for reading and practical suggestions for reading widely, reading well, and for making it all worthwhile.

Moves seamlessly through a wide range of post-Reformation writers encountering and sometimes confronting institutional Christianity.

Paints a picture of the Russia through its most important literary sites, including the works of Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pushkin, and Mayakovsky.

Essays on the major concerns and questions regarding literature and theology.

Offers a guide to studying and understanding literature, especially poetry, and an inspiring look at what it means to think like poets and view the world through literary eyes.

Demonstrates ways of reading novels and stories from a Christian perspective.

Covers over 500 classic and contemporary works of Christian fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, providing a plot summary, analysis of Christian themes, and an annotated bibliography for each title.

Traces Melville's response to a whole array of 19th-century exegetical writings.

Argues that Melville's poem Clarel is actually a study in comparative religion - one that explores faith and doubt in the post-Darwinian age.

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

Asks why these ancient divisions between Catholics and Protestants were so deep, why they continued into the 19th century and how novelists and poets, theologians and preachers, historians and essayists reinterpreted the religious debates.

Presents the genre of mythopoeic fantasy from a holistic perspective, arguing that this central genre of fantasy literature is largely misunderstood as a result of decades of incomplete and reductionist literary studies.

Applies interdisciplinary approaches to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology.

Journeys through The Divine Comedy to discover what Dante reveals about love in his literary masterpiece.

Examines what it means to return to works of fiction that have influenced us.

Provides a quick and simple introduction to early Christian writings.

Explores the alternately complementary and conflictual ways that religion and literature have appealed to the Western spiritual sensibility.

Considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion.

Show that Christian humanism informs a broad and important literature and encourages a genuine diversity of thought based on reason, nature, and the accomplishments of artistic genius.

Examines the role that evangelical romance fiction plays in the devotional life of Christian women.

Provides a comprehensive, conceptually challenging history of Russian literature, including prose, poetry and drama.

Explores a broad range of writings on spirituality in contemporary Japanese literature.

Explores the place of faith in the lives of writers who wrote after Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential 1837 call to establish a national literary culture free from "the learning of other lands."

Shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers confronted questions of doubt and belief.

Offers a window into the soul of American culture and its literary figures.

Offers an understanding of Christianity's key concepts, themes, images, and characters as they relate to English literature up to the present day.

Reveals in the works of Shakespeare and his sources the figure of the citizen-saint, who represents at once divine messenger and civil servant, both norm and exception.

Great works and authors of the world are introduced and reviewed artistically, intellectually, and theologically.

Uses the study of the writings of men and women in the 17th century to argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political sphere shaped their relation to it.

Draws upon insights from history, theology, philosophy, and literature to connect two of the most glorious and unique truths of Christianity - its hopeful eschatology and its doctrine of a dynamic, personal Trinity.

Uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibility of religious experience for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian worship today.

Shows how Shakespeare uses Hamlet to comment on the Calvinistic Protestantism predominant around 1600.

Explores the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past.

Covers over 500 classic and contemporary works of Christian fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, providing a plot summary, analysis of Christian themes, and an annotated bibliography for each title.

Examines the impact of theology on Shakespeare's poetry.

Examines the religious background of Shakespeare's works and helps students use his plays to understand religion in Elizabethan England.

Provides a comprehensive, conceptually challenging history of Russian literature, including prose, poetry and drama.

Deals with the topic of Shakespeare and religion from the history and postmodern philosophy and theology.

Brings together 16 original essays by leading scholars who examine Shakespeare's works in light of this new scholarship: their goal is to explore a possible interpretive consensus from Protestant, Catholic, and secular perspectives.

Explores Shakespeare's thoroughgoing engagement with the religious culture of his time.