A groundbreaking exploration of the themes of faith and doubt in Emily Dickinson's poetry

Despite the crucial importance of religion in American life, the place of religion in literary studies continues to take a backseat to trendier academic causes. This book helps remedy this deficiency by exploring the place of faith in the lives of writers beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In Believing Again Roger Lundin brilliantly explores the cultural consequences of the rather sudden nineteenth-century emergence of unbelief as a widespread social and intellectual option in the English-speaking world. / Lundin's narrative focuses on key poets and novelists from the past two centuries Dostoevsky, Dickinson, Melville, Auden, and more showing how they portray the modern mind and heart balancing between belief and unbelief. Lundin engages these literary luminaries through chapters on a series of vital subjects, from history and interpretation to beauty and memory. Such theologians as Barth and Balthasar also enter the fray, facing the challenge of modern unbelief with a creative brilliance that has gone largely unnoticed outside the world of faith. Lundin's Believing Again is a beautifully written, erudite examination of the drama and dynamics of belief in the modern world. In Believing Again Roger Lundin brilliantly explores the cultural consequences of the rather sudden nineteenth-century emergence of unbelief as a widespread social and intellectual option in the English-speaking world. Lundin s narrative focuses on key poets and novelists from the past two centuries Dostoevsky, Dickinson, Melville, Auden, and more showing how they portray the modern mind in tension between faith and doubt. Lundin engages these literary luminaries through chapters on a series of vital subjects, from history and interpretation to beauty and memory. Such theologians as Barth and Balthasar also enter the discussion, facing the challenge of modern unbelief with a creative brilliance that has gone largely unnoticed outside the world of faith. Lundin s Believing Again is a beautifully written, erudite examination of the drama and dynamics of belief in the modern world.

Playing on the frequently used metaphors of the 'turn toward' or 'turn back' in scholarship on religion, The Turn Around Religion in America offers a model of religion that moves in a reciprocal relationship between these two poles. In particular, this volume dedicates itself to a reading of religion and of religious meaning that cannot be reduced to history or ideology on the one hand or to truth or spirit on the other, but is rather the product of the constant play between the historical particulars that manifest beliefs and the beliefs that take shape through them. Taking as their point of departure the foundational scholarship of Sacvan Bercovitch, the contributors locate the universal in the ongoing and particularized attempts of American authors from the seventeenth century forward to get it – whatever that 'it' might be – right. Examining authors as diverse as Pietro di Donato, Herman Melville, Miguel Algarin, Edward Taylor, Mark Twain, Robert Keayne, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Paule Marshall, Stephen Crane, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik, among many others-and a host of genres, from novels and poetry to sermons, philosophy, history, journalism, photography, theater, and cinema-the essays call for a discussion of religion's powers that does not seek to explain them as much as put them into conversation with each other. Central to this project is Bercovitch's emphasis on the rhetoric, ritual, typology, and symbology of religion and his recognition that with each aesthetic enactment of religion's power, we learn something new.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline was a bestseller in nineteenth-century America, inspiring generations of readers with a heroine who overcomes colonial violence and exile in her romantic and spiritual quest across America. Long ignored by modernist scholars, Evangeline is finally getting the critical attention it deserves. Drawing on original research in Longfellow’s scholarly manuscripts, Bartel explores the theological sources and spiritual world of Evangeline, arguing that Longfellow was inspired by the church fathers to craft Evangeline into a heroine who uniquely exemplifies, in her epic quest, the ancient Christian doctrines of deification and divine light. Bartel’s Glimpses of Her Father’s Glory returns Evangeline to its rightful place as a major poem of American literature, one that takes as its theme nothing less than the ultimate purpose of human existence.

Garnering awards from Choice, Christianity Today, Books & Culture, and the Conference on Christianity and Literature when first published in 1998, Roger Lundin's Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief has been widely recognized as one of the finest biographies of the great American poet Emily Dickinson. Paying special attention to her experience of faith, Lundin skillfully relates Dickinson's life -- as it can be charted through her poems and letters -- to nineteenth-century American political, social, religious, and intellectual history. This second edition of Lundin's superb work includes a standard bibliography, expanded notes, and a more extensive discussion of Dickinson's poetry than the first edition contained. Besides examining Dickinson's singular life and work in greater depth, Lundin has also keyed all poem citations to the recently updated standard edition of Dickinson's poetry. Already outstanding, Lundin's biography of Emily Dickinson is now even better than before.

"Focusing on Emily Dickinson's poem "Apparently with no surprise," Keane explores the poet's embattled relationship with the deity of her Calvinist tradition, reflecting on literature and religion, faith and skepticism, theology and science in light of continuing confrontations between Darwinism and design, science and literal conceptions of a divine Creator"--Provided by publisher.