Faith in Poetry: Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief (New Directions in Religion and Literature)

In this ambitious book, Michael D. Hurley explores how five great writers – William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – engaged their religious faith in poetry, with a view to asking why they chose that literary form in the first place. What did they believe poetry could say or do that other kinds of language or expression could not? And how might poetry itself operate as a unique mode of believing? These deep questions meet at the crossroads of poetics and metaphysics, and the writers considered here offer different answers. But these writers also collectively shed light on the interplay between literature and theology across the long nineteenth century, at a time when the authority and practice of both was being fiercely reimagined.

Michael D. Hurley teaches English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is a University Lecturer and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. He is the author of G. K. Chesterton (2012), co-author (with Michael O'Neill) of Poetic Form (2012), editor of the new Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Father Brown Stories, and co-editor (with Marcus Waithe) of Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (2017).

Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, and an editor of Bloombury's New Directions in Religion and Literature series.

Mark Knight is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. His books include Chesterton and Evil (2004), Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700-2000 (co-edited with Thomas Woodman, 2006), Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (co-written with Emma Mason, OUP, 2006), An Introduction to Religion and Literature (2009) and Religion, Literature and the Imagination (co-edited with Louise Lee, 2009). Current projects include: a monograph entitled Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel; a co-authored book (with Emma Mason) entitled Faithful Reading: Poetry and Christian Practice; and a co-edited volume (with Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate) entitled A Bible and Literature Reader. With Emma Mason, Mark Knight edits the book series New Directions in Religion and Literature for Bloomsbury Academic.