Innocence is a rich and emotive idea, but what does it really mean? This is a significant question both for literary interpretation and theologyyet one without a straightforward answer. This volume provides a critical overview of key issues and historical developments in the concept of innocence, delving into its ambivalences and exploring the many transformations of innocence within literature and theology. The contributions in this volume, by leading scholars in their respective fields, provide a range of responses to this critical question. They address literary and theological treatments of innocence from the birth of modernity to the present day. They discuss major symbols and themes surrounding innocence, including purity and sexuality, childhood and inexperience, nostalgia and utopianism, morality and virtue. This interdisciplinary collection explores the many sides of innocence, from aesthetics to ethics, from semantics to metaphysics, examining the significance of innocence as both a concept and a word. The contributions reveal how innocence has progressed through centuries of dramatic alterations, secularizations and subversions, while retaining an enduring relevance as a key concept in human thought, experience, and imagination.
This volume provides a critical overview of key issues and historical developments in the concept of innocence, delving into its ambivalences and exploring within literature and theology. This interdisciplinary collection discusses major symbols and themes surrounding innocence, including purity and sexuality, childhood and inexperience, nostalgia and utopianism, morality and virtue. This book examines the significance of innocence as both a concept and a word, revealing how innocence has progressed through centuries of dramatic alterations, secularizations and subversions, while retaining an enduring relevance as a key concept in human thought, experience, and imagination.
Recenzijas
"'What, then, is innocence?' The question echoes that of Augustine on time, and there are no quick and easy answers. Yet the essays in this book, as an exemplary exercise in the interdisciplinary study of literature and religion, offer a rich and challenging response to that question. Beginning with the Bible, they engage with the problem of innocence though a range of literary texts that recover or explore the scriptural and historical roots of the idea of innocence that are too often forgotten in Christian theology. Rooted in these literary texts the book is aglow with theological and imaginative insights." - David Jasper, Professor of Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow
"While the best work in theology, the arts, and the humanities has long recognized the complexity of innocence, there have been too many occasions in which the concept has been idealized, distorted or dismissed. The last of these responses has been especially common in recent years, with scholars seeming to fear that an interest in innocence might risk the accusation of academic naivety. But as this rich and insightful collection makes clear, innocence can be thought about in all sorts of fruitful ways and deserves our sustained attention. With a careful eye to matters of form, history and theology, the contributors assembled here do a wonderful job of helping us to realize why the concept of innocence has the rich history it does, and why it deserves to be thought about anew. This is an important and rewarding collection." - Mark Knight, Lancaster University
| Preface |
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ix | |
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| Introduction |
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1 | (20) |
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1 Affirmation and negation: The semantic paradox at the heart of innocence |
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21 | (20) |
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2 The innocence of George MacDonald |
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41 | (17) |
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3 The seduction of innocence: Erotic aesthetics from Kierkegaard to decadentism |
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58 | (18) |
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4 The repentance of language: Geoffrey Hill, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and poetic integrity |
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76 | (20) |
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5 Imaginative innocence and conscious Utopia in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities |
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96 | (18) |
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6 The innocences of revolution: Failed Utopias and nostalgic longings in Evgenii Zamyatin's We and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Heart of a Dog |
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114 | (18) |
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7 A.I. - Artificial intelligence: Genealogies of the posthuman child |
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132 | (15) |
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8 Can there be innocence after failure? |
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147 | (20) |
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9 Moral innocence as the negative counterpart to moral maturity |
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167 | (16) |
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| Afterword |
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183 | (2) |
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| Contributors |
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185 | (4) |
| Index |
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189 | |
Elizabeth S. Dodd is Programme Leader for Postgraduate Common Awards programmes at Sarum College, Salisbury, and Assistant Programme Leader for the MA in Theology, Imagination and Culture. She has been an academic tutor for ministry training through STETS and Sarum College since 2012, after completing her doctorate on Thomas Traherne at Cambridge University, supervised by Professor David Ford. She has published a monograph entitled Boundless Innocence in Thomas Trahernes Poetic Theology (Ashgate, September 2015) and a forthcoming essay collection on Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth Century Thought with Cassandra Gorman (D.S. Brewer). Her main research interests are in literature and theology, particularly seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry and the theme of innocence in Christian literature. She also has an interest in theological aesthetics, in particular the uses of genre theory and the public role of the lyric voice in theology, and is currently working on a project on that topic for T&T Clark. Carl Findley received his Ph.D. from The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at The University of Chicago. His research and publications (including works on Musil, Schiller, and Dostoevsky as well as contemporary Austrian writers) explore the labile borders that ideas traverse, probing diverse literary traditions and the translation of theoretical forms into avant-garde literary practices. His work interrogates the relationship between ideas and bodies, and the aesthetic and ethical possibilities from the collapse of intellectual practices, religious paradigms, and gendered realities in 19th and 20th Century Austrian, German, Russian, and American novels. He is Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Interdisciplinary Studies and Great Books at Mercer University and is currently completing a book entitled, The Secular Moment: Second Innocence and Aesthetic Tyranny in Robert Musil.
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