Innocence Uncovered : Literary and Theological Perspectives

Innocence is a rich and emotive idea, but what does it really mean? This is a significant question both for literary interpretation and theology―yet 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.

Elizabeth S. Dodd completed her doctorate on Thomas Traherne’s poetics of innocence at Cambridge University, under the supervision of Professor David Ford, and published it as Boundless Innocence in Thomas Traherne’s Poetic Theology (2015), along with a collection of essays on Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth-Century Thought with Cassandra Gorman (2016). Her research interests lie in area of theological aesthetics, and she is currently working on a monograph on the lyric voice in English theology. She lectures in theology, imagination and culture and in the ministry programmes at Sarum College in Salisbury, and is programme leader for the ministry MA.

Carl E. Findley III 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 Robert Musil, Dostoevsky, and Schiller) explore the labile borders that ideas traverse, probing diverse literary traditions and the translation of theoretical forms into avant-garde literary practices. Findley’s work interrogates the relationship between ideas and bodies, and the aesthetic and ethical possibilities from the collapse of intellectual praxis, religious paradigms, and gendered realities in 19th and 20th Century Austrian, German, Russian, and American novels. He is currently Lecturer of Liberal Arts at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.