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 is Programme Leader for Postgraduate Common Awards programmes at Sarum College, Salisbury, and Assistant Programme Leader for the MA in Theology, Imagination and Culture. She has been an academic tutor for ministry training through STETS and Sarum College since 2012, after completing her doctorate on Thomas Traherne at Cambridge University, supervised by Professor David Ford. She has published a monograph entitled Boundless Innocence in Thomas Traherne’s Poetic Theology (Ashgate, September 2015) and a forthcoming essay collection on Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth Century Thought with Cassandra Gorman (D.S. Brewer). Her main research interests are in literature and theology, particularly seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry and the theme of innocence in Christian literature. She also has an interest in theological aesthetics, in particular the uses of genre theory and the public role of the lyric voice in theology, and is currently working on a project on that topic for T&T Clark. Carl Findley 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 Musil, Schiller, and Dostoevsky as well as contemporary Austrian writers) explore the labile borders that ideas traverse, probing diverse literary traditions and the translation of theoretical forms into avant-garde literary practices. His work interrogates the relationship between ideas and bodies, and the aesthetic and ethical possibilities from the collapse of intellectual practices, religious paradigms, and gendered realities in 19th and 20th Century Austrian, German, Russian, and American novels. He is Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Interdisciplinary Studies and Great Books at Mercer University and is currently completing a book entitled, The Secular Moment: Second Innocence and Aesthetic Tyranny in Robert Musil.
