Religion and the muse : the vexed relation between religion and Western literature / Ernest Rubinstein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rubinstein, Ernest.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Religion and literature.

Physical Description:

xvi, 262 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [2007]

Summary:

Ever since Plato banished poets from his ideal state, Western religion and literature have been in tension. Through close readings of selected texts, Religion and the Muse explores the alternately complementary and conflictual ways that religion and literature have appealed to the Western spiritual sensibility. The book constructs a turbulent line of mutual critique, with joint origins in Plato and Dante. It finds theoretic harmony above the historic fray, through the ideas of creativity, beauty, experience, and ethics, in which both religious and literary texts participate. However, the dimensions of ambivalence in the relations between religion and literature are shown in both the concordant and discordant interpretations that the religious and literary texts make of six perennial themes: love, death, evil, suffering, forgiveness, and saintliness.

Contents:

Mutual critiques

Theoretic concerns

Short religio-literary readings of six perennial themes.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-246) and indexes.

ISBN:

0791471497

9780791471494

OCLC:

71189712