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81. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 4
Kevin J. Gardner

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Following the pattern set by Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, numerous post-war English poets responded to the decline of the Church of England as a physical and cultural fabric by composing elegies on the Church. Steeping their poems in the collective memory of Anglicanism, they commemorate church buildings and churchyards as sites of collective memory, endow the history and landscape of Britain with Christian mythology, and lament the social ramifications of a post-Christian culture. This essay demonstrates that a poetic lament for the loss of Anglican hegemony is a common motif in post-war English poetry and defines genre of “church elegy.” What is mourned is not the loss of Christianity itself but the end of a common cultural identity once sustained by the Church of England. In response, poets fretted by the disorder and fragmentation of modern British society are engaged in an effort to resuscitate Anglican cultural memory.

82. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 4
Brian Barbour

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Although Thomism, “hillbilly” or otherwise, is central to Flannery O’Connor’s thought and art, it has received precious little attention from those who comment on her work. Still, if one knows how to look, it is pervasive, ordering and animating her fiction and helping to ground her comic vision. But it is so thoroughly, artistically, integrated into her work that most readers seem to pass over it leaving it unnoticed and unremarked. Yet it is present in at least six ways and often they are so intertwined as to reinforce one another: as a metaphysics of being (The Violent Bear It Away, “A View of the Woods” and passim); as an epistemology of moderate realism (“Good Country People”); as a historical narrative showing the loss of the first two (passim in her general regard for the Cartesian Protagonist); as an anthropology of the human person as a composite of body and soul (“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”); as a natural law morality (“A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”); and as an objective aesthetics (“A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Enduring Chill”). Understanding the basics of her philosophical Thomism enables the reader to grasp a good deal of what actually characterizes her fiction and yet is routinely missed.

83. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 4
Yanbin Kang

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Combining reception theorists’s emphasis upon the function of readers for meaning production with Bakhtin’s model of exotopic intercultural relation, this essay argues that for Chinese readers, Dickinson works as part of a long meditative tradition. The discussion positions the air and wind in the center of her image cluster, examining the formation of her poetics of emptiness that is marked by a negative tendency. In this vein, Dickinson’s “lonesome Glee,” which is often associated with deprivation, pain and lack, is read as a manifestation of wandering at ease, a spiritual ideal that resonates with Daoism and Chan Buddhism. Her effort to reconfigure heaven, as evidenced in a subset of poems including “Peace is a fiction of our Faith -” (Fr971), illuminates how she uses apophatic strategies to negotiate the Christian dogmas, gradually achieving a knowledge and articulation that intriguingly echo Chinese philosophies.

84. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 4
Zhiyong Mo

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85. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 4

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86. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 3
Adam Glover

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This article examines “Poem of the Eucharistic Bread” (1946) by the underappreciated twentieth-century Argentine Catholic poet Francisco Luis Bernárdez (1900-1978). It contends that “Poem of the Eucharistic Bread” is not only a poem about the Eucharist, but also a kind of allegory of the Eucharist, one whose poetic diction frames the process of poiesis as significantly analogous to the sacramental character of the Eucharist itself. In the process, the article also suggests that Bernárdez’s rare combination of poetic talent and theological sensitivity ought to win him a wider readership among scholars interested in the relationship between literature and theology.

87. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 3
Martin Brick

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This essay uses process theology, and branch of theology that emphasizes a teleological perspective regarding sin and suffering, to examine the treatment of death and the uncanny in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The attitude of the mourners of Tim Finnegan from the first chapter of the novel is compared to the attitude of ALP in her closing monologue, with each view corresponding to a different variety of eschatology, futurized (focused on the afterlife) and realized (how knowledge of the end influences lived existence). ALP’s hopeful demeanor illustrates a balance of these two types, and despite Joyce’s denunciation of organized religion, promotes a deeper spiritual existence and self-reflection.

88. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 3
Peter Whiteford

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In 1885, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote two letters to Robert Bridges in which he referred briefly to several sonnets that he had recently written, and that he intended to send. He did not name the poems, and his subsequent failure to send them left the sonnets permanently unidentified and the remarks about them inevitably cryptic. Nevertheless, subsequent critics have readily and almost unanimously agreed that the remarks refer to some of the poems collectively known as the terrible sonnets; in a curiously circular argument, they have interpreted the remarks in the light of their reading of the sonnets and have, at the same time, used the remarks to shed light on the poems. Critical attention has focused particularly, and almost exclusively, on two remarks: in the first letter, the observation that one sonnet was “written in blood,” and in the second, the assertion that four of the sonnets came “like inspirations unbidden and against my will”. In this article, I argue that these remarks have been misinterpreted — in part, because of assumptions made about the putative group of terrible sonnets and in part through a failure to properly contextualize those letters.

89. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 3
Alan Blackstock

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G. K. Chesterton and T. S. Eliot both employed the concepts of orthodoxy and heresy to evaluate the work and influence of some of the most prominent writers of their day. One of Chesterton’s best-known books is titled Orthodoxy, (1908) and one of his earliest works of literary criticism was a collection of articles first written for the Daily News and later published under the title Heretics (1905). T.S. Eliot delivered a series of lectures at the University of Virginia in 1933 that were later collected and published as After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. In these lectures, Eliot, like Chesterton in his newspaper columns, illustrates the “limiting and crippling effect of a separation from tradition and orthodoxy” on writers whom he otherwise admires. Both authors invoke the concepts of orthodoxy to identify these threatened traditions and of heresy and heretic to identify the forces and figures that constitute the principal threats.

90. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 3

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91. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 2
John Curran, Jr.

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92. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 2
Michael VanderWeele

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This essay argues for a more civic interpretation of Dante’s dream of the Siren in Purgatorio 19 by connecting the reprimand and consolation that surround the dream to the reprimand and consolation that surround the Old Testament images of Israel as faithless spouse—and that are typical of other parts of the Divine Comedy. Such a reading fits the liturgical character of the Purgatorio better than the dominant post-Freudian readings can and it lets the passage speak to civic as well as personal questions. If the Siren is more than a psychological image, then the way we see her counterpart, Beatrice, can be broadened as well. In fact, she might be seen as image of a Christian body politic as well as source of Dante’s affection. This puts the Divine Comedy into closer connection with Augustine’s City of God and with Boethius’ Consolation as well as with Israel as God’s spouse.

93. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 2
Thomas P. Flint

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While many authors have written about the undertone of violence present throughout Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," little has been said about the specific references in the story to the Civil War. These references, though, serve to highlight questions concerning evil, guilt, and punishment that come to the fore especially in the culminating scene between the grandmother and The Misfit. In the end, the story seems to be suggesting, trying to determine the fittingness of the evils we (as individuals or as a society) encounter may best be seen as a further manifestation of the pride that precipitated our original Fall; these are matters best left to God's judgment, not to ours.

94. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 2
John Coates

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Adopting the premise that Walter de la Mare’s writing cannot be fully understood without attending to its moral, spiritual and religious dimensions, this paper examines in detail his longest and most important novel, Memoirs of a Midget (1921). It draws analogies between his movement from a dogmatic moralism towards a sense of the numinous and compares them with similar tendencies in Arthur Machin and Algernon Blackwood.

95. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 2

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96. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 1
John E. Curran Jr.

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97. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 1
Lucas Nossaman

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This essay examines Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poetry, an ongoing project of verse composed during Sunday walks, as a unique blend of Christian theology and ecological teaching gleaned from the Bible and from English pastoral poets. In particular, the perspective on Sabbath in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene has influenced Berry’s reflections on rest in an ecological context. From close analyses of three Sabbath poems, the essay concludes that the Sabbath poetry progresses from conventional georgic rooted in Old Testament teachings about land to a Christian critique of culture in the pastoral mode, and finally, in Berry’s most mature verse, to a psalm of praise for kindly work accomplished through the reconciliation of humans with God. In the Sabbath poetry, Berry’s ultimate hope lies in an eternal rest that will paradoxically also involve the active participation of the creation with the Creator.

98. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 1
Joyce Kerr Tarpley

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Among Austen commentators, the traditional view of manhood holds that it is innate, “‘a matter of course,’ a given quality of a man’s nature” (Trilling, 1957, cited in Johnson, 1995). However, since the 90’s, this view has been contested, especially in Emma, with the argument that “masculinity is something the novel contests and constructs” (Johnson, 1995). In “Manhood and Happiness in Emma: Liberal Learning and Practicing the Language of Marriage,” I frame Austen’s understanding of manhood in terms of education. In order to become the man he ought to be, he must be teachable, he must be a liberal learner, and most important for Austen, he must develop certain Christian qualities of mind: humility, kindness, and forgiveness. This education for manhood can only take place within marriage, but not just any kind of marriage will do. To reinforce this point, I contrast two different kinds of marriage — the cornerstone versus the capstone — and I discuss the kinds of thinking (which I represent as languages) that go with each. Using Mr. Weston and Frank Churchill, I argue that within a capstone marriage, the languages of materialism and narcissism make it impossible to develop the qualities of mind necessary for manhood. With Mr. Knightley, who has the most potential for manhood in the novel, I argue that to fulfill this potential he must choose a cornerstone marriage, within which he may practice the language of marriage, thereby learning to express humility, kindness, and forgiveness. By acquiring these qualities and by learning to love the right things — truth, goodness, and beauty — in the right way, Mr. Knightley becomes the man he ought to be — not only in Emma’s eyes — but also in Austen’s.

99. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 1
J. V. Long

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Evidence in the text of Brideshead Revisited shows that it is inadequate simply to link Evelyn Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism with his ostensibly reactionary sensibility. Rather than merely providing an exercise in apologetics, Waugh’s novel displays religious experience that is grounded in the author’s conversion and practice of his faith. The novel mines a deep understanding of both the complex experience of English Catholicism and the riches of the liturgical drama and texts that were experienced during the Holy Week Tenebrae services with which he was familiar.

100. Renascence: Volume > 70 > Issue: 1
Matthew M. Davis

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This essay looks at how various characters in King Lear view Lear’s authority after he divides the kingdom. The author argues that some characters, including Goneril, Regan, and Oswald, view Lear’s kingly authority as “defeasible” – that is, they believe it is something he can lose or give away. Other characters, particularly Kent, view Lear as a person who has an indefeasible, inalienable authority. The author makes a connection between “indefeasible authority” and the concept of divine right of kings and presents a detailed analysis of Oswald, Kent, and the Fool using these concepts.