Subject Guide: Literature

Addresses the genre of childhood writings by major authors, and explore the genesis of genius.

Examines a range of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems drawn from across her career, to explore the concern with the search for a meaningful home which underpins much of her writing.

Analyzes the bond between lyric poetry and silence in women's sonnets ranging from the late 18th-century works of Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Anna Maria Smallpiece to Victorian texts by Elizabeth Barrett, Christina Rossetti, Isabella Southern, and other, lesser-known female poets.

Offers a provocative look at some of Western civilization's most infamous authors and their literary works and shows how these works have inflicted great evil in the world and still cause suffering.

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

Uses diverse authors to show how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word can inform and enrich nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death.

The author tells the story of the spiritual transformation that produced a complete change in her literary goals.

Analyzes Gilbert Keith Chesterton and his late 19th and early 20th century fiction.

Explores G.K. Chesterton's imaginative and spiritual development, from his early childhood in the 1870s to his intellectual maturity in the 1st decade of the twentieth century.

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

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.

Practical and amusing guide to literature that unlocks hidden truths and discovers the world of the works.

Reveals which books and authors have shaped the author's life—from classic works of English literature to hard-boiled detective novels, and everything in between.

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

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.

Considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to public speakers and examines the ways in which they conceived the relations between political speech and literary endeavor.

An overview of the work that features a biographical sketch of the author, a list of characters, a summary of the plot, and critical and analytical views of the work.

Examines the origins of Dickens vision of the French Revolution, the literary power of the text itself, and its enduring place in British culture through stage and screen adaptations.

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

Uses Dicken's four books - Nicholas Nickelby, Barnaby Rudge, American Notes, and Martin Chuzzlewit - to show how his traditional social philosophy lies at the heart of Dickens's artistic achievement.

Analyzes novels, nonfiction prose, poetry, paintings, and photographs to examine the ideological contradictions in Victorian representations of men at work.

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

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.

Emphasizes the complexity, difficulty, and rare pleasures of the Victorian writers' strenuous efforts both to entertain and to teach.

Places Dickens and Wilkie Collins against such important figures as John Henry Newman and George Eliot in seeking to recover their response to the religious controversies of mid-19th century England.

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

Tells of over 500 literary locales across the United States and Europe.

Connects social reform to the formal features of literary works and relationships between English and the U.S. through novel-writing.

Lists hundreds of places in Britain and Ireland and details their connections with the lives of famous writers.

Offers a close analysis of novels that are uniquely representative of the 19th century, including the work of Austen, Eliot, Scott, Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Trollope, Braddon, and the Bronte sisters.

Introduces Victorian literature and its context from 1837-1900.

Presents a panoramic view of literary life in Britain from 1870 to 1914, teasing out authors' relations with the reading public and tracing how reputations were made and unmade.

Contains 100 of the greatest poems written by 48 women in English over the past 150 years.

Considers both stylistic and imaginative features of 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson.

Paying special attention to her experience of faith, the author skillfully relates Dickinson's life to 19th-century American political, social, religious, and intellectual history.

Explores the impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass.

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.

Explores 19th-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life.

Investigates the emerging gaps between literary scholarship and the reading experience itself.

Explores how well-known women writers have influenced us in our writing and in life.

Describes the very different sorts of poetry Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville wrote, their comparable reasons for writing as they did, and the posthumous critical effects of their having done so.

Contains entries on 74 authors who were actively writing during the renaissance in 19th-century America.

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

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

Offers a comprehensive account of the literary and theological background to English devotional poetry of the seventeenth century, concentrating on Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw.

Practical and amusing guide to literature that unlocks hidden truths and discovers the world of the works.

Explores Donne's divine poetry, his prose work, the Devotions Upon Emergent Occassions, and his sermons.

Argues the thesis that John Donne's poetry can now profit from being read in the context of early modern cultural experience, specifically its visual culture.

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

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.

Provides an introduction to literature and its context from 1603-1688, including: - the historical, cultural and intellectual background.

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

Anthology of the final works of great poets.

Uses works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne to show that the seemingly contradictory presence of traditional and subversive elements in their major works actually creates the source of much of their literary achievement.

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

Takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world.

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

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).

Brings together elements of modernist culture, contemporary intellectual and aesthetic movements, and all the genres of modernist writing and art.

Includes essays of authors, poets, and people from many other walks of life.

Explores the cultural bearings of literary modernism across multiple fields, geographies, symbolic forms, and media.

Analyzes novels, nonfiction prose, poetry, paintings, and photographs to examine the ideological contradictions in Victorian representations of men at work.

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

Tracks the evolution of Modernism from its emergence in the late 19th century to its recent incarnations.

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

Provides scholars with the necessary methods and tools for studying literature produced between 1880 and 1945.

Chronological survey of major influences on T.S. Eliot's worldview that covers the poet's spiritual and intellectual evolution in stages.

Explores and celebrates the rise and development of modernist and avant-garde literatures and theories of this particular period, from Imagism to the Apocalypse movement.

Discussions of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Rose Macaulay that show how their work participated in contemporary debates about journalism.

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.

Examines case studies of British, Caribbean, and American poetries from the 1920s through the 1990s.

Lists hundreds of places in Britain and Ireland and details their connections with the lives of famous writers.

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

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.

Argues that Eliot's poetry (and drama and criticism) can be seen as a unified and coherent body of work.

Nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection.

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

Offers a comprehensive account of the literary and theological background to English devotional poetry of the seventeenth century, concentrating on Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw.

A definitive scholarly edition of Herbert's complete English poems, accompanied by extensive explanatory and textual apparatus.

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

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

Reveals Madeleine L'Engle in all her complexity, through a series of incisive interviews with the people who knew her most intimately.

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

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.

Madeleine L'Engle's circle of friends and peers (writers, poets, scholars, theologians) provide an intimate portrait of L'Engle and respond to her writings and mentoring influence.

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

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

Shows how to discover the truest reality in Aslan, the lion in Narnia and Christ in this life.

Explore C.S. Lewis's life, works, and the world of Narnia the fun and easy way.

Introduces the surviving fragments of Lewis's translation of Virgil's epic poem, which were rescued from a bonfire.

Presents Lewis's earlier years life when he studied privately and at Oxford, served in the British army, was wounded in France, entered into his affair with Janie Moore, and wrote and published his first book of poems.

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

Challenges the standard interpretation that Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and the other Inklings had little influence on one another's work.

A uniquely in-depth study of the crossover novel, Falconer engages with a ground-breaking range of sources, from primary texts, to child and adult reader responses, to cultural and critical theory.

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

Highlights spiritual treasures below the surface of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.

Shows how Narnia relates to other imaginative worlds and children's literature about the history within the stories of Narnia and how Narnia fits into Lewis's other work.

Explores the deep spiritual themes of redemption and grace found in the popular Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis.

Surveys 400 English children's fantasies from 1850 to 2000.

Enables C. S. Lewis enthusiasts to gain access and understanding into the mind of the author of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the creator of the world of Narnia.

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

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 great moral themes of Lewis's seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia series, paying particular attention to key vices and virtues.

Leads readers into a deeper understanding of Christ and will help them discover how these tales by C. S. Lewis beautifully expose a dynamic, joyful, loving God who wants his creatures to experience deep joy and delight.

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.

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

Explores symbols, hidden meanings, and easily missed details that swirl in and around Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Offers a detailed look at C. S. Lewis's enchanting stories and focuses on the extraordinary intellect and imagination of the man behind the Wardrobe.

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

Helps the reader understand the growing interest in Lewis and his work.

Explains the origins of C.S. Lewis's Narnia.

One reader's long, tumultuous relationship with C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia that looks at its creator, Clive Staples Lewis.

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 important ways in which Lewis so clearly echoes Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen and John Milton's Paradise Lost in The Chronicles of Narnia.

Sheds new light on the making of the original Narnian, C. S. Lewis himself.

Reveals the spiritual world of Narnia as seen through the main characters' interactions with Aslan the Lion.

Collection of his essays and critical reviews organized around the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis's poetry, Lewis and the two women poets with whom he had lasting relationships, and a critical perspective on the way in which critical interest in Lewis has developed over the last thirty years.

Examines The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from Lewis's point of view, shedding light on his imagination and use of literary forms.

Provides a guided tour of Prince Caspian that highlights characters, setting and framework, with rich background details to enhance your reading of the story.

Theologists, psychologists, academics, feminists and fantasists offer humor, insight, and fresh perspectives on the Chronicles of Narnia series.

Unveils a fun-filled world based on intriguing Bible insights for every Narniac!

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

Shows that the best way to enter Narnia is to read the Chronicles of Narnia as fairy tales.

Explores Christian themes in C.S. Lewis's children's stories.

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

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

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

Examines this British Victorian writer's employment of female figures to represent Deity.

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

Focuses on representative literary works that illustrate turns in the history of individuality and subjectivity and the changes in ones relations with community and society.

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.

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.

Challenges the widely accepted view of Milton as a poet of absolute, unquestioning certainty.

Offers a comprehensive account of the literary and theological background to English devotional poetry of the seventeenth century, concentrating on Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw.

Offers a close reading of pivotal passages and critical concerns in 'Paradise Lost' and examines Milton's presentation of Adam and Eve's relationship through the intersections of theology and gender in the poem.

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

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

Traces the process through which Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others adapted, revised, or resisted romance, mapping a world of increasingly uncertain allegiances and affiliations.

Assesses Milton's significance to the development of early modern English political thought, his conception of the English nation, and his response to pressures exerted by a secular modernity grounded on international commercial activities.

Examines how a literary tradition of dissent against joining the state church after the return of monarchy in 1660 was produced by those who suffered political defeat and religious exclusion in Restoration England.

Challenges many received ideas about Milton's brand of Christianity, philosophy, and poetry.

Re-evaluates claims of Milton as anti-feminist, pointing out that he was not seen that way by contemporaries, but espoused startlingly modern ideas of marriage and the relations between the sexes.

Argues for the necessity of reading Milton's poetry within contemporary theological concerns and debates.

Addresses Milton's treatment of millennial and apocalyptic ideas, topics of major importance in the religious and philosophical thought of his day.

Considers how John Milton's later works demonstrate the intensive struggle of spiritual reading.

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

Offers a wide-ranging exploration of how Milton's visions of tolerance reveal deeper movements in the history of the imagination.

Highlights the importance of Stanley Fish to Milton studies and provides major insights into the nature of Miltons works.

Examines patterns of ecclesiological and affective imagery in several of Milton's poems, including Lycidas, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes.

An account of the life, times, politics, loves, and letters of the great English poet John Milton.

Examines the important ways in which Lewis so clearly echoes Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen and John Milton's Paradise Lost in The Chronicles of Narnia.

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

Tells of over 500 literary locales across the United States and Europe.

Combines commentaries on Milton's Paradise Lost in the last three centuries.

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

Provides an introduction to literature and its context from 1603-1688, including: - the historical, cultural and intellectual background.

Traces the path of friendship through Miltons epistolary friendship with Charles Diodati, his elegies, divorce pamphlets and poems.

Studies the figure of God as a literary character in the writings of John Milton.

Focuses on Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes and uses feminist and relational psychoanalytic theory to study the challenge intersubjective experience poses to doctrinal formulations of difference.

Anthology of the final works of great poets.

Argues for a new way of reading the figure of Milton's God, contending that Milton rejects kings on earth and in heaven.

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

Offers a wide range of perspectives that explore our changing views of violence in a post-9/11 world and inform our understanding of a writer whose fiction abounds in violence.

Assesses the impact of the mid-century political, religious, and social milieu on novels and short stories that attract attention today and relates O'Connor to the issues of her day and concerns of the early 21st century.

Sets O'Connor and Percy against the background of the Southern Renaissance from which they emerged and showing how they shared a distinctly Christian notion of art that led them to see fiction as revelatory and how their methods of revelation took them in different directions.

Offers thoughts about O'Connor as a writer preoccupied with religious, and especially Catholic, theories.

Comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.

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

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

Clusters the work of five masters - Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver - to offer a poetics of the form for students and scholars.

Madeleine L'Engle's circle of friends and peers (writers, poets, scholars, theologians) provide an intimate portrait of L'Engle and respond to her writings and mentoring influence.

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

Analyzes the bond between lyric poetry and silence in women's sonnets ranging from the late 18th-century works of Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Anna Maria Smallpiece to Victorian texts by Elizabeth Barrett, Christina Rossetti, Isabella Southern, and other, lesser-known female poets.

Argues that Swift turned his back on the elite to write for a popular audience and that he annexed scandals to his fictionalized print alter ego, creating a continual demand for works by or about this self-mythologized figure.

Draws on discoveries made over the past 30 years to tell the story of Swift's life.

Seeks to contextualize Swift within the political arena of his day.

Uncover the theological currents that lie just under the surface of Tolkien's epic tale.

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

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.

Challenges the standard interpretation that Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and the other Inklings had little influence on one another's work.

Complete guide to the lands, legends, histories, languages, and people of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Traces the evolution of J.R.R. Tolkien's literary world, stories, and characters from their earliest written forms to the final revisions Tolkien penned shortly before his death in 1973.

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 biblical and Christian themes that are found in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Shows how a Christian worldview and Christian themes undergird Tolkien's Middle-earth writings and how they are fundamentally important to understanding his vision.

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.

Attempts to illuminate the structure of Tolkien's work, allowing the reader to appreciate its broad, overarching design and its careful, painstaking construction.

Includes discussions of all the fundamental issues in Tolkien scholarship written by the leading scholars in the field.

Examines the source and style of Tolkien's Catholic imagination, from Bibilical typology to personal relationships.

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

Tells how classic literature inspired Christian authors.

Takes us on the road with Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and selected classic works of literature to show how great stories bring us so much more than entertainment.

Organizes the philosophical themes in The Lord of the Rings into 50 categories with over 1,000 references to the text.

Illuminates the multifaceted appeal of Tolkien's prose style in dimensions ranging from his fantastic realism to his revitalizing imagery to his dynamic narrative to his expansive characterization to his engaging language.

Provides a comprehensive, informed, critical and theoretical analysis of both the book and film trilogies.

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.

Analysis of Tolkien's Roman Catholicism and the role it plays in understanding his writings.

Surveys the predecessors of and influences on Tolkien and explores the web of elements that make up Tolkienian fantasy.

Tells the full story of how Tolkien embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into World War I.

Examines Tolkien's modern world fantasy with its postmodern implications and and its significance in understanding the intersection between traditionalist and counter-culture criticisms of the modern.

Examines the theological relationship between creation and creativity in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Gathers together what the editors believe is the best criticism on the Lord of the Rings over the past 50 years.

Examines heroic qualities in the women and other beloved, though less-celebrated, characters in the The Lord of the Rings books and movies.

Examines the role of war in Tolkien's life and works.