Elisabeth Jay

The Oxford handbook of English literature and theology

INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS THE FORMATION OF THE TRADITION LITERARY WAYS OF READING THE BIBLE THEOLOGICAL WAYS OF READING LITERATURE THEOLOGY AS LITERATURE THE GREAT THEMES AFTERWORD

Jewish feeling: difference and affect in nineteenth-century Jewish women’s writing

engagement with apophatic theology, putting Derrida’s work in relation to Jewish esotericism in order to open up the possibility of dialogic encounter between the two. Chapter 5 traces the nomadic thought of Edith Wyschogrod, whose attempt to think identity-in-difference manages to escape idolatry only insofar as it is incapable of being embodied by a liturgical community. Chapter 6 concludes with a critique of Christian feminist, deconstructionist and phenomenological engagements with negative theology, none of which succeed, on Wolfson’s account, in resisting the lure of theomania. Ultimately, Wolfson concludes, the only way not to speak about God idolatrously is to simply not speak about God. But theology is not simply an attempt to speak truly about God; it is also an attempt to ground particular communities, not only in their religious practices but also – as is clear from Wolfson’s discussions of each key thinker – their ethical and political commitments. The question of the future of these ethical and political commitments haunts this book throughout and yet, perhaps inevitably, never quite arrives.

Constance Maynard's Life-Writing Considered as Spiritual Autobiography

Viewing Constance Maynards unwieldy life-writings within the tradition of spiritual autobiography reveals many of the irresolvable tensions with which she wrestled. Although she chose to see her public role as spearheading a crusade against modern rationalism, her inner life was as much concerned with the struggle to repudiate her parents’ ascetic Evangelical piety in favour of a more emotionally intense spirituality. Her conviction of conversions centrality fostered a sense of mission which bolstered a sense of her own exceptionality as a ‘prophet’ chosen by God. This in turn nourished her belief that she was justified in exempting herself from the roles and relationships conventionally assigned to her gender, by pursuing same-sex desire and sexless motherhood.

‘Ye careless, thoughtless, worldly parents, tremble while you read this history!’: the Use and Abuse of the Dying Child in the Evangelical Tradition

Virginia Woolf had been brought up in a family for whom memorials to and biographies of the dear departed formed the life-blood of their literary tradition.2 Yet what could the daughter of Leslie Stephen, biographer to a nation’s achievers, find to say of those killed in a state of unfulfilled promise, before they had attained the distinguishing features which might warrant an obituary notice? What afterlife was it possible to provide for those who had died without belief in a spiritual hereafter? For many Victorians who came after the era of the great nineteenth-century geologists it was no longer possible to look to nature for Wordsworthian consolation in imagining ‘a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years’,3 nor to seek in nature the analogies and guarantees of a Provident Creator’s care for the fall of the individual sparrow.’ The metanarrative of the Christian community had been replaced for unbelievers by transitional authorities such as Huxley, but logically this process allowed for further ‘evolution’ into entirely privatized ‘notions’ of death’s metaphysical and ethical significance. This alienation from shared interpretative traditions meant that any attempt to read another’s reactions must be hedged about by ironic quotation marks. Clarissa’s beliefs remain inscrutable partly because of the variety of nuance accruing to the information that she had read Huxley and Tyndall ‘as a girl’, or determined to behave ‘like a lady’.

“Mrs Brown” by windsor's other widow

Abstract Like many royal-watchers then and now Oliphant indulged in the paradox of viewing her monarchs life as both just like her own and yet wholly exceptional. In the late story, The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow (1890), Oliphant used the fruits of a quarter of a centurys exposure to Windsor gossip to mull over Queen Victorias penchant for relationships likely to incur the courts disapproval. It was, however, typical of Oliphant that whatever the impulse that generated the tale, in the writing it became as much a self-reflexive endeavour as a ringside commentary upon recent events.

‘When Egypt’s slain, I say, let Miriam sing!’: Women, Dissent and Marginality

I should like, if I may, by way of introduction to begin with a brief story: a couple of years ago I was attending a conference where I heard an interesting paper on ‘being a feminist philosopher in a British University’. The first question after the paper came from a very eminent male professor, who, bypassing the quite complex arguments she had presented, said ‘All right then, what would you do if you were the Academic Vice-President of a University?’ To my amazement this capable and experienced female academic became flustered and inarticulate.

Doubt and the Victorian Woman

You will, I am sure, be relieved to know that I have limited my speculations under this catch-all title to women and doubt as examined in a few examples of imaginative literature from the second half of the nineteenth century. Since it is the intersection between women and doubt, between the feminine role and the capacity for intellectual scepticism, that interests me, I have not limited myself to the works of female authors, nor to those written from either an orthodox or a sceptical position. I have largely ignored the relation between authorial experience and literary product and related questions such as the reasons which might have led some women writers to incarnate the sceptical experience in male form.