Renascence

The fifteen “Messenger Leaves” poems Whitman assembled as part of the third (1860) edition of Leaves of Grass exhibit a tension between the prophetic and the sacramental that would become more significant as the United States entered the decade of the Civil War. Comprised of poems that provide warnings and admonitions (the prophetic) and poems that offer consolation and healing (the sacramental), in “Messenger Leaves” Whitman uses biblical models and texts to appeal to the religious sensibilities of the American people. Although “Messenger Leaves” as a cluster was dissembled in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, its religious themes draw attention to Whitman’s envisioning of the third edition as the “new Bible.”

Literary fiction is the most appropriate way of describing the phenomenon of love. It appreciates the uniqueness and preciousness of individuals, and it allows for universalizing. By following the experiences of Madeleine and Leonard, the main characters in Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, I focus on the problem of experiencing love through the lenses of different literary constructs. Following Raimond Gaita, I find that love is a reaction to the preciousness of human beings. Two particularly important aspects are sensitivity and the ability to react to the call of seriousness hidden in the declaration of love. I attempt to evaluate Madeleine's and Leonard's situation by means of the category of moral responsibility and self-awareness.

Joan Didion uses Biblical analogues in her novel Play It As It Lays (1970) to recount the American western myth she learned in her youth, “the story that the wilderness was and is redemptive” (“Thinking about Western Thinking” 14). Her use of scriptural analogues helps us to understand the moral themes in this novel. Situating her novel in America’s most disappointing frontier —Hollywood, Didion uses the Biblical metaphor of the desert to relate a tale of moral chaos illustrated by failed marriages, sexual adultery, forsaken children, and suicide. In Didion’s scriptural analogues, we see, in this Hollywood story, a contemporary wilderness riven by spiritual despair and moral devastation, but a wilderness that can lead to deliverance.

This article offers four views of Walker Percy’s fourth novel, Lancelot: [1] The novel echoes themes engaged by William Faulkner in two of his works, Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun ; [2] Lancelot advances Faulkner’s particular assertion that the “past is never dead, it is not even past”; [3] as the novel’s epigraph suggests, Percy also writes Lancelot in relation to Dante Alighieri’s early 14th century poetic allegory, The Divine Comedy; [4] understanding Lancelot as an advancement of Faulkner’s view of history by means of Dante’s theology contradicts Shelby Foote’s memorial hope that Percy would be remembered “not merely [as] an explicator of various philosophers and divines,” but as a novelist in “simple and solemn fact.”

This article analyzes the emotional maturation of Louisa Gradgrind and Jane Eyre as they move from the extremes of repression and indulgence to expressive moderation. In comparing the emotional lives of the novels’ major and minor characters, it becomes clear that both stories ultimately endorse a Pauline ethic of anger – in stark contrast to the Victorian ideals of their time. In showing how Louisa and Jane navigated cultural mores to reach a place of healthy anger, these novels invite modern readers to do the same – to exercise similar discretion and righteous restraint to secure good and meaningful endings to their lives.

Bernard Lonergan, SJ, has noted that an empty box does not know it is empty and does not care whether it is empty or full. An empty stomach, on the other hand, knows when it is empty and yearns for what will satisfy it. Flannery O’Connor’s stories present the reader with a parade of characters who are empty boxes in the process of becoming empty stomachs. William Lynch, SJ, said that many times such conversions result from stark encounters with the finite, thus accounting for the grotesque in O’Connor’s stories.

The article offers a new reading of the central portion of Wilde's famous prison letter, which I call the letter's "spiritual center." In this central section, Wilde contemplates his future and expresses his desire to start a new life, a Vita nuova. As he works to envision in writing a future that can integrate the suffering of his prison experience, he outlines a spiritual vision that is both startlingly original, and informed by varied religious traditions, including Buddhism, Taoism, and the British Occultist movement. In this article, I provide a careful reading of the four tasks Wilde sets out for himself to serve as the foundation for his Vita nuova. In order to better understand the context for Wilde's spiritual writing, I also explore briefly the religious and spiritual influences of the author's life. I conclude with a consideration of the values which underlie Wilde's four tasks, and the spiritual portion of his letter in general; namely, individual self-realization, suffering, and acceptance. Taken together, my article's contextual study and attentive reading of De Profundis's spiritual center offer a new understanding of both Wilde's practical spirituality and the spiritual milieu of the fin-de-siècle.

Paul A. Lacey’s rich meditation on the importance of reading and re-reading offers sage perspective on Henry James’s The Ambassadors and The Portrait of a Lady. Waxing wise on W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and A. E. Housman, Lacey’s essay provides a reason not to lose touch with the works we love to read and re-read.

Through the juxtaposition of an image (in the prologue) of Christ in Mary’s womb with that (in the tale) of Almachius as a bladder full of hot air, The Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale contributes to the theme in The Canterbury Tales of overcoming tyranny. While the nun’s tale alone presents an overly forceful apologetic, the image that Chaucer includes in her prologue subtly reminds audiences of a more paradoxical relationship between creator and creatures than that of either tyrant-and-subjects or tale-teller-and-audience-to-be-indoctrinated. Chaucer, if not so much the well-meaning nun, emulates the creator of freedom. So too does the tale-telling fellowship, which reveals Christ in its enduring togetherness, despite the attempts of individual tellers to have the last word.

The Restoration poet Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656-1710) includes in her Poems on Several Occasions (1703) a short but important work, "Song: To Lerinda," that blends sacred and sexual love between two women. Better known to readers for her proto-feminist perspective in The Ladies Defense (1701), Chudleigh expresses outrage about the poor treatment of wives, though in this work she does not go so far as to suggest a same-sex union as an alternative to traditional marriage for women. Several shorter works in the Poems allude to unorthodox forms of spiritual or erotic experience for women, including "Song: To Lerinda," which, like the majority of her writing, demonstrates Chudleigh’s intellectual range and deep reading of classical philosophy. Willing to take risks in her poetry, Chudleigh re-imagines the Platonic homoerotic love ideal, which she revises to include women’s same-sex desire in the "Song." The imagined experience between the two women in the poem communicates an erotic and philosophical ideal of communal love that embraces rather than rejects physical pleasure as a means of accessing a higher spiritual realm. The love relationship between the women challenges hetero-normative social patterns, and the speaker suggests that same-sex desire is spiritually and sexually preferable for them.

This article discusses the presence of figures of thought in some well-known feminist essays by Virginia Woolf. The novelist and essayist was especially sensitive to the challenging situation of women throughout history as far as their personal and professional desire for equality in a male-centered society was concerned. Woolf tries to make readers aware of her feminist views by using expressive resources like figures of speech or schemes, tropes and figures of thought in her writing. Figures of thought can be defined as those specific gestures which are designed to interact with the audience. Their use is connected with the functional use of language in the sense that they may draw readers’ attention away from the textual content and toward the context. Since the essays chosen for this study were first read aloud or were written in the form of letters before being published, the appeal to audience may be more deliberate and thus effective. The figures analyzed are enallage of person, erotema, ecphonesis, prosopopeia, aposiopesis and prolepsis.

This essay discusses George Herbert’s treatment of the good of works in his poetry and prose. I first consider the position of the early modern Church of England on good works and then turn to Herbert’s imagining of sanctification as the natural efflorescence of justification across a selection of his Latin and English lyrics. Next I suggest that The Temple and The Country Parson are twin books that make up Herbert’s vision of the complete Christian, justified and undergoing sanctification. If The Temple forms a map with justification as the collection’s destination, then The Country Parson is a work of “practical piety” with the process of sanctification, the enacting of good works by a justified sinner, as its principal goal. Through these complementary works Herbert projects an ambitious spiritual program, commencing in the justification of the human heart and subsequently evolving into the dispersal of holiness, charity, and good works in the world.

One of James Joyce’s best-known tendencies as a writer of fiction is his avoidance of anything like authorial intrusion. As his best biographer, Richard Ellmann, puts it: “Joyce never insists.” This choice could have presented a problem for him in writing Dubliners, for he intended that collection of stories to be a moral exposé of the “dear, dirty Dublin” that he had fled. A main means of his satisfying both desires is what this essay identifies as “doubling.” Time after time, Joyce gives characters descriptions, mannerisms, modes of speaking, etc., that duplicate those of another character in another story. Simultaneously, he puts characters into similar situations, sometimes facing common dilemmas. Differences in their ways of responding to their crises nudge the reader—who is often predisposed by Joyce’s mnemonic devices—into the moral judgments that Joyce almost certainly hoped to instill.

This essay explains how D. H. Lawrence occupies an unusual place in 20th century ethical discourse—between Heidegger’s privileging of strength-in-aloneness and his ethics of “letting be,” and Levinas’ privileging of the experience of otherness as the fundamental moment of ontology. Lawrence’s rhetoric, especially in his essays, seems to advocate a Heideggerian ethical position; however, by examining The Rainbow and Women in Love, this essay demonstrates how Lawrence’s fiction pushed him towards the acknowledgement that otherness is the fundamental basis for ethics.