Cover of Renascence
>> Go to Current Issue

Renascence

Volume 73, Issue 3, Summer 2021

Table of Contents

Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Browse by:



Displaying: 1-4 of 4 documents


1. Renascence: Volume > 73 > Issue: 3
Brian Barbour The Crucifix and the Post: A Note on the Christian Theme in Gulliver’s Travels
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
An unremarked major theme in Gulliver's Travels is, Why does Gulliver lose his Christian faith? In Part III he is a devout Anglican who unlike Dutch Calvinists will not disrespect the crucifix, even at the cost of not being allowed to return home. In Part IV he dismisses the crucifix as a "post," a thing "indifferent." What has happened is made clear in Chap. VII where Gulliver's reveals his parodic or inverted conversion to the ruling principle of the Houyhnhnms, that "Reason alone is sufficient to govern a rational creature." For Swift that disastrous alone is a grave error, linking the earlier errors of the Reformation - sola gratia, sola fide, sola scriptura - with the coming darkness of the Enlightenment. Gulliver's loss of faith is predictive of the next phase of European intellectual life.
2. Renascence: Volume > 73 > Issue: 3
J. Daniel Batt Do This in Remembrance of Me: Bits and Pieces in Re-membering the Body
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Written 136 years apart, Melville’s Moby Dick and Morrison’s Beloved explore the scriptural tension between the material and spiritual. Against two different American landscapes, each work explores incarnation as both manifestations of the divine and the Word given flesh—two uniquely separate functions. Throughout the stages of Queequeg’s and Baby Suggs life, and other characters, as well, the stages of archetypal incarnation are expressed amongst two distinct populations, similar first in their need for incarnated divinity. Ultimately, these incarnations ask us to see the divine in our physical bodies, now—new bodies for new Words.
3. Renascence: Volume > 73 > Issue: 3
Julie Ooms “A private holy spirit in small letters”: Sylvia Plath’s Secular-Age Religion
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Scholars regularly read Sylvia Plath biographically, but few have focused on her religious beliefs and their manifestation in her work. This essay explores Plath’s ideas about religion, and about Christianity in particular, as they are articulated in college papers, in her journals, and in her fiction. It argues, finally, that Plath’s wrestling with Christian religious ideas is that of the kind of “cross-pressured” believer characterized by Charles Taylor; she is a humanist atheist tempted by belief.
4. Renascence: Volume > 73 > Issue: 3
Notes on Contributors
view |  rights & permissions | cited by