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Theological and Philosophical Explorations of the Call of Literature: Power of the Word VI book cover

1st Edition

Theological and Philosophical Explorations of the Call of Literature Power of the Word VI

Edited By David Lonsdale, Emilia Di Rocco, Brett H. Speakman Copyright 2025
284 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

284 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This book explores the ‘call’ of literature, for both writers and their audiences, and reflects on how literary works have informed and drawn from – and continue to inform and draw from – theology, philosophy and sacred scripture. Key questions addressed include the following: How do creative writers and critics conceive this call? What does it mean to speak of a ‘vocation’ to write and what have... Read more

List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction 

PART I: The Prophetic and the Religious Calling 

1. John Henry Newman, Poetry and the Grammar of Assent

David Jasper

2. The Call of Poetry

Marta Gibinska

3. Calling, Kairos, Kerygma: The Example of William Blake

Daniel Gustafsson

4. 'It calls the calling ‘manly’: Some Thoughts on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Vocation

Adrian Grafe

5. R. S. Thomas - Priest and/or Poet

Przemysław Michalski

PART II: Literary and Spiritual Journeys 

6. Flannery O’ Connor: The Road to the Province of Joy

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

7. Goethe’s Roman Holiday: A Meeting and Mingling of Self and World

Michael Kirwan

8. Detective Fiction and the Human Search for Meaning

Brett Speakman

9. Le compte à rebours: Michel Houellebecq, Soumission, and the Literature of Spiritual Exhaustion

Michael Murphy

PART III: Deepening the Call: Encounters Between Literature, Philosophy and Theology

10. Why Not Flowers? A Writer in the Garden and a Call of Literature: Some Thoughts Dedicated to Sandor Márai

Marta Zając

11. The Unvoiced Fundamental Note: Atheistic Literature and Divine Resonances

Joseph Simmons

12. 'Not with clever speech': Tesich's Karoo: Literary Insights on Postmodernity

Nicolas Steeves

13. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poetic Calls: The Performance of the Word

Michèle Draper

14. Hermeneutics and Resurrection: Re-reading Virgil in Dante’s Purgatorio 21-22

Thomas Graff

PART IV: Responding to the Call

15. ‘Write what it is to be man’: What Literature is Called to Do

Jean Ward

16. The Call of the Muses and The Lure of the Sirens: Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s literary vocation

Stefano Maria Casella

17. Poetry as a Call to Dance: George Mackay Brown and the Healing Power of Literature

Katarzyna Dudek

18. Poetry and Silence: The Dilemma for the Spiritual Poet

James Harpur


Index

Biography

David Lonsdale is a retired senior lecturer at Heythrop College, University of London, and a research associate at Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, Cambridge, UK.

Emilia Di Rocco is a professor of Comparative Literature at Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy.

Brett H. Speakman completed his PhD at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St Andrews, UK. He teaches literature and theology at The McCallie School in Chattanooga, TN, USA.

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