With full attention to the classical, medievel, and Renaissance traditions that constituted the milieu in which Milton wrote, Lieb explores the sacral basis of Milton's thought. He argues that Milton's responsiveness to the holy as the most fundamental of experiences caused his outlook to transcend immediate doctrinal concerns. Acccordingly, Lieb contends that the consecratory impulse not only underlined Milton's point of view but infused all aspects of his work. Originally published in 1981. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

What are the poetics of everyday life ? What can they teach us about God? Art, music, dance, and writing can certainly be poetic, but so can such diverse pastimes as fishing, skiing, or attending sports events. Any and all activities that satisfy our fundamental need for play, for celebration, and for ritual, says William Dyrness, are inherently poetic and in Poetic Theology he demonstrates that all such activities are places where God is active in the world. All of humanity s creative efforts, Dyrness points out, testify to our intrinsic longing for joy and delight and our deep desire to connect with others, with the created order, and especially with the Creator. This desire is rooted in the presence and calling of God in and through the good creation. With extensive reflection on aesthetics in spirituality, worship, and community development, Dyrness s Poetic Theology will be useful for all who seek fresh and powerful new ways to communicate the gospel in contemporary society. William Dyrness s bold invitation to a poetic theology shaped by Scripture, tradition, and imagination one luring us toward a fuller participation in beauty than argument or concept alone allow reminds us that truth itself is beautiful to behold and poetic to the core. . . . If poetry is in its deepest reflex an intensification of life, then Dyrness s call for a poetic theology is one we ignore at our peril, reminding us that faithful living is not only about proper thinking but also and, perhaps, more properly about the texture of our living and the quality of our loving. Mark S. Burrows Andover Newton Theological School Makes a strong case for aesthetics as one of the avenues used by God to draw human beings near to him and his glory. . . . A wonderful journey through Reformed spirituality and a wake-up call for Reformed theology. Cornelius van der Kooi Free University, Amsterdam

This book examines the ways in which Dostoevsky's adoption and reinvention of the medieval Russian holy fool - in Russian Orthodoxy, a person who feigned madness or folly as an ascetic feat of self-humiliation - serves as a locus for a critique of his culture's increasing reliance on the scientific paradigms of Claude Bernard's physiology, and as a source of formal narrative innovation in his novels. The author first explores the paradoxical hagiography of the holy fool, whose saintly acts are disguised under the mask of demonic folly. She then traces the rise of medical science in the nineteenth century and the increasing authority of the new scientific models of human behavior, especially the all-important notion of "the normal and the pathological." The book then shifts to close readings of four of Dostoevsky's major novels - Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov - always keeping the double focus of cultural critique and formal innovation. The author examines how Dostoevsky develops a specific literary procedure that is itself "holy foolishness." That is, his novels in their structure and, in particular, in the voice of their narrators mislead, tempt, and "scandalize" the reader, much like the street theater of the medieval holy fool. This difficult relationship between reader and text is mirrored in what is represented in the text as the interaction between the holy fool and other characters. In its theoretical orientation, the book both builds from and criticizes Bakhtin's work on carnival. The author offers a less optimistic account, showing how in Dostoevsky carnival is more demonic than jubilant, particularly in The Devils, where carnival leads to a frightening chaos.

Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"--recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way." In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits. Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

What might contemporary thinkers learn from prayer? The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche suggested a possibility: that prayer teaches us how to attend. This book explores the precedents of Malebranche s advice by reading John Donne s poetic prayers in the context of what David Marno calls the art of holy attention. This requires an understanding of attention s role in Christian devotion, which he provides by uncovering a tradition of holy attention that spans from ascetic thinkers and Church Fathers to Catholic spiritual exercises and Protestant prayer manuals. Donne s devotional poems occupy a unique position in this tradition. Marno identifies in them a devotional model of thinking whose aim is to experience an affect of attention. Marno s argument is framed by compelling close readings of Death, be not proud, Donne s most triumphant poem about the resurrection. Elsewhere, Marno takes up Claudius s prayer in "Hamlet" and Saint Augustine s account of attention in the "Soliloquies" and the "Confessions." The book ends with a Coda on the aftermath of holy attention in the philosophies of Descartes and Malebranche."

Vittoria Colonna was one of the best known and most highly celebrated female poets of the Italian Renaissance. Her work went through many editions during her lifetime, and she was widely considered by her contemporaries to be highly skilled in the art of constructing tightly controlled and beautifully modulated Petrarchan sonnets. In addition to her literary contacts, Colonna was also deeply involved with groups of reformers in Italy before the Council of Trent, an involvement which was to have a profound effect on her literary production. In this study, Abigail Brundin examines the manner in which Colonna's poetry came to fulfil, in a groundbreaking and unprecedented way, a reformed spiritual imperative, disseminating an evangelical message to a wide audience reading vernacular literature, and providing a model of spiritual verse which was to be adopted by later poets across the peninsula. She shows how, through careful management of an appropriate literary persona, Colonna's poetry was able to harness the power of print culture to extend its appeal to a much broader audience. In so doing this book manages to provide the vital link between the two central facets of Vittoria Colonna's production: her poetic evangelism, and her careful construction of a gendered identity within the literary culture of her age. The first full length study of Vittoria Colonna in English for a century, this book will be essential reading for scholars interested in issues of gender, literature, religious reform or the dynamics of cultural transmission in sixteenth-century Italy. It also provides an excellent background and contextualisation to anyone wishing to read Colonna's writings or to know more about her role as a mediator between the worlds of courtly Petrachism and religious reform.

Robin Blaser, one of the key North American poets of the postwar period, emerged from the "Berkeley Renaissance" of the 1940s and 1950s as a central figure in that burgeoning literary scene. The Holy Forest, now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time—from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.