The written word is one of the defining elements of Christian experience. As vigorous in the 1st century as it is in the 21st, Christian literature has had a significant function in history, and teachers and students need to be reminded of this powerful literary legacy. Covering 2,000 years, The Encyclopedia of Christian Literature is the first encyclopedia devoted to Christian writers and books. In addition to an overview of the Christian literature, this two-volume set also includes 40 essays on the principal genres of Christian literature and more than 400 bio-bibliographical essays describing the principal writers and their works. These essays examine the evolution of Christian thought as reflected in the literature of every age. The companion volume also features bibliographies, an index, a timeline of Christian Literature, and a list of the greatest Christian authors. The encyclopedia will appeal not only to scholars and Christian evangelicals, but students and teachers in seminaries and theological schools, as well as to the growing body of Christian readers and bibliophiles.

NEW ENGLAND BEYOND CRITICISM “Elisa New’s book is a remarkable achievement. It is very rare that a critic manages to ask what seem exactly the right questions, then to answer them in a lively, brilliant, evocative, and supremely intelligent prose.” Charles F. Altieri, University of California “Elisa New is a refreshing voice among critics and historians of literature. She has a keen sense of the nature of New England and its deep spiritual resources, reaching back to the Puritans, moving through the great nineteenth-century expressions of interior landscapes and visions. This is a book I welcome and celebrate.” Jay Parini, Middlebury College Literary criticism of the past thirty years has undercut what the canonizers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw as the fundamental role of early New England in the development of American literary culture. And yet, a determination in literary circles to topple perceived Ivy League elitism and Protestant cultural creationism overlooks the continuing value, beauty, and even practical utility of a canon still cherished by lay readers around the world. This Manifesto raises questions about how academic specialization and the academic study of New England have affected enthusiasm for reading. Using a range of interpretive practices, including those most often deployed by contemporary academic critics, Elisa New cuts across firmly established subfields, mixing literary exegesis with autobiographical reflection, close reading with cultural history, archival and antiquarian inquiry with experiments in style, and lays bare editorial orthodoxies, raising to question the whole hierarchy of values now governing the study of American and other literatures. Taking New England as a test case for a wider, more accessible set of critical practices, New England Beyond Criticism demands that the domain of literary study be opened further to the tastes of the general reader.

Left unpublished for over 200 years, the poetry of colonial American writer Edward Taylor has left an undeniable impact on the American literary landscape. Upon its release, the concrete, carnal, and, to some, scandalous content and language of his poetry seemed to stand in contradiction with the man himself, a minister and doctrinaire Puritan. This book presents a psychoanalytic reading of both Taylors' religion and his poetry, shedding light on the language which has so puzzled readers since its initial publication.

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.