Ecstasy and Understanding

Adrian Grafe

ISBN 10: 0826498647 / ISBN 13: 9780826498649

Published by Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008

About this Item

pp. xi + 183.

Seller Inventory # 262355959

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Ecstasy and Understanding
• Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826498647
• ISBN 13: 9780826498649
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

This collection of research explores the interaction of religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many different types of poetics may be seen to be at work in the period 1875 to 2005, along with various kinds of religious awareness and poetic expression. Religious experience has a crucial influence on literary language, and the latter is renewed by religious culture. The religious dimension has been a decisive factor of modern English poetic expression of the last hundred years or so.
The religious and mystical dimension of poetry of the period is borne out by the focus on, among other things, grace and purgation, the tension between time and eternity, redemption and the demands of eschatology, immanence and transcendence, and conversion and martyrdom. Chapters also explore how church practice and ritual, architecture and liturgy, play into the poetry of the period. This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of this important but often overlooked aspect of modern English poetry.

About the Author

Adrian Grafe is Professor of English at Université d'Artois, France. He has published widely on the connections between popular music and literature and written for TLS, Essays in Criticism and The Spectator. He co-edited and contributed to 21st-Century Dylan: Late and Timely (Bloomsbury, 2021). His novel The Ravens of Vienna was published in 2022.