From the author's introduction: The title of this book contains a double entendre: its chapters look both at attempts to perfect desire in divine fashion and at the means by which Tennyson's poems try to divine' the nature of desire itself. The author argues that Tennyson's poems, his character

For millennia, messianic visions of redemption have inspired men and women to turn against unjust and oppressive orders. Yet these very same traditions are regularly decried as antecedents to the violent and authoritarian ideologies of modernity. Informed in equal parts by theology and historical theory, this book offers a provocative exploration of this double-edged legacy. Author Jayne Svenungsson rigorously pursues a middle path between utopian arrogance and an enervated postmodernism, assessing the impact of Jewish and Christian theologies of history on subsequent thinkers, and in the process identifying a web of spiritual and intellectual motifs extending from ancient Jewish prophets to contemporary radicals such as Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek.

Exhibition catalogue for Diedrick Brackens