Graduate Study of Christianity & Literature

This is a repost of an email originally by Steve Petersheim (a grad student at Baylor), which is in turn a compilation of various book recommendations by members of the Christianity & Literature listserv, for titles relevant to advanced study of Christianity & literature.

Seminal Books for the Study of Christianity & Literature
Christianity and Literature Listserv
October 2009

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in the Western World. [Auerbach compares and analyzes Homer’s Odyssey and the Bible as the two texts that have most influenced the western world’s ways of thinking about reality.]

Bakhtin, Mikail. Art and Answerability (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). [RP: if you prefer the primary texts, probably the early essays]

Bercovitc, Sacvan. American Jeremiad. [HKB]

Berry, Wendell. Sex Economy Freedom and Community [HKB]

Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep. [HKB]

Borgman, Erik, Bart Philipsen and Lea Verstricht, eds. Literary Canons and Religious Identity. Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. [DM]

Brown, Robert Macafee. Spirituality and Liberation. [HKB]

Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture. [HKB]

Cavill, Paul, et al. History of the Christian Tradition in English Literature and Criticism. [MF]

Coles, Robert. The Call of Stories. [HKB]

Coates, Ruth. Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author (Cambridge UP, 1998) [RP: as Bakhtin, of all the great mid-20thc theorists, was closest to Christianity]

Cunningham, David. Reading is Believing: the Christian Faith through Literature and Film. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos P, 2002. [DM]

Cunningham, Valentine. Reading after Theory. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. [DM]

Edwards, Michael. Towards a Christian Poetics. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1984. [BH: Edwards, whose ideas of Possibility, how language was affected in the Fall, and a ternary pattern in tragedy following the fall from Paradise and promise of redemption are particularly interesting.]

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane [HKB]

Ferretter, Luke. Towards a Christian Literary Theory. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003. [BH: Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture; Ferretter examines the implications of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and hermeneutics for Christian literary theory. Of particular interest is his explanation of what a text is in the Christian perspective (yes, I know that that definite article is troublesome). Ferretter also discusses Edwards' book.]

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed." [JS: Chapter 2 (his definition of the "banking concept") is usually anthologized in teaching anthologies. Liberation Theology is the anchor of the book.]

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism [HKB]

Frye, Northrop. The Critical Path [HKB]

Hamlin, Hannibal. Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature. (Cambridge University, 2004) [PT: perhaps too recent to be seminal...]

Hass, Andrew, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay. The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology. Oxford: University Press, 2009. [BH: has some excellent essays]

Holland, Scott. "How Do Stories Save Us?" [TB: little article, quite helpful tome as a theology grad student]

Jacobs, Alan. A Theology of Reading. [OC]

Jasper, David. The Study of Literature and Religion (2nd ed., Macmillan, 1992) [RP: introductory viewpoint]

Jeffrey, David L. People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture. Eerdman, 1996. [JB: This book clarified to me the history of Christian reading and how this relates to contemporary theory, particularly Bloom and Derrida.]

Lewalski, Barbara. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton UP, 1979) [PT]

Lewis, C. S. The Weight of Glory [HKB]

Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain [HKB]

Lewis. R. W. B. American Adam. [HKB]

Marsden, George. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. [HKB]

McFague, Sally. Speaking in Parables. [TB: quite helpful to me as a theology grad student]

Middleton, Darren J. N. Theology after Reading: Christian Imagination and the Power of Fiction. Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2008. [DM]

Noll, Mark. Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. [HKB]

O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners [TB: offer for consideration]

Ryken, Leland. The Christian Imagination. [MF: Theory and criticism: Collected essays having to do with imagination and literature]

Schad, John. Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (Brighton:
Sussex Academic Press, 2004) [RP: from a Christian academic deeply touched by Derrida]

Shanks, Andrew. ‘What Is Truth?:’ Towards a Theological Poetics. London; NY: Routledge, 2001. [DM]

Smith, James K. A. and Henry Isaac Venema, eds. The Hermeneutics of Charity: Interpretation, Selfhood, and Postmodern Faith. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos P, 2004. [DM]

Steiner, George. Real Presences. [MF: Theory: though not applying Christian theology or philosophy explicitly, confronts postmodern literary theory with an approach Christians should at least be aware of if not welcome (there are other approaches).]

Stern, Karl. The Flight from Woman. [MF: Literary History: This too-little-known book covers a few major literary authors like Ibsen, Tolstoy and Goethe (and Sartre's Nausea) but also a few philosophers (Descartes, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard), in a broad view and interpretation of western culture up to the book's publication date of 1965. (Alas, we may be into a Flight from Man now.) I think it's a strong Christian philosophical as well as psychological take on "where / how western culture went wrong," along the lines of the duality of gender and their respective ways of knowing. Much of it struck me as profound and moving.]

Thiessen, Gesa Elsbeth, ed. Theological Aesthetics: A Reader. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2005. [DM]

Veith, Gene Edward, Jr. Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture Wheaton: Crossway-Good News, 1994. [BH: Turning Point Christian Worldview Series… helpful, clear, and thoughtful to students struggling to understand postmodernism]

CONTRIBUTORS
Tim Basselin (Fuller Theological Seminary)
Jeff Bilbro (Baylor University)
Harold K. Bush (St Louis U)
Mark Filiatreau (Patrick Henry College)
Brian Heffron
Darren J. N. Middleton (Professor of Religion, Texas Christian University)
Steven Petersheim (Baylor University)
Roger Pooley (Keele University, U.K.)
Jake Stratman (John Brown University)
Olympia Sibley
Patricia Taylor (University of Connecticut; suggestions are Renaissance focused)