Following the pattern set by Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, numerous post-war English poets responded to the decline of the Church of England as a physical and cultural fabric by composing elegies on the Church. Steeping their poems in the collective memory of Anglicanism, they commemorate church buildings and churchyards as sites of collective memory, endow the history and landscape of Britain with Christian mythology, and lament the social ramifications of a post-Christian culture. This essay demonstrates that a poetic lament for the loss of Anglican hegemony is a common motif in post-war English poetry and defines genre of “church elegy.” What is mourned is not the loss of Christianity itself but the end of a common cultural identity once sustained by the Church of England. In response, poets fretted by the disorder and fragmentation of modern British society are engaged in an effort to resuscitate Anglican cultural memory.

Although Thomism, “hillbilly” or otherwise, is central to Flannery O’Connor’s thought and art, it has received precious little attention from those who comment on her work. Still, if one knows how to look, it is pervasive, ordering and animating her fiction and helping to ground her comic vision. But it is so thoroughly, artistically, integrated into her work that most readers seem to pass over it leaving it unnoticed and unremarked. Yet it is present in at least six ways and often they are so intertwined as to reinforce one another: as a metaphysics of being (The Violent Bear It Away, “A View of the Woods” and passim); as an epistemology of moderate realism (“Good Country People”); as a historical narrative showing the loss of the first two (passim in her general regard for the Cartesian Protagonist); as an anthropology of the human person as a composite of body and soul (“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”); as a natural law morality (“A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”); and as an objective aesthetics (“A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Enduring Chill”). Understanding the basics of her philosophical Thomism enables the reader to grasp a good deal of what actually characterizes her fiction and yet is routinely missed.

Combining reception theorists’s emphasis upon the function of readers for meaning production with Bakhtin’s model of exotopic intercultural relation, this essay argues that for Chinese readers, Dickinson works as part of a long meditative tradition. The discussion positions the air and wind in the center of her image cluster, examining the formation of her poetics of emptiness that is marked by a negative tendency. In this vein, Dickinson’s “lonesome Glee,” which is often associated with deprivation, pain and lack, is read as a manifestation of wandering at ease, a spiritual ideal that resonates with Daoism and Chan Buddhism. Her effort to reconfigure heaven, as evidenced in a subset of poems including “Peace is a fiction of our Faith -” (Fr971), illuminates how she uses apophatic strategies to negotiate the Christian dogmas, gradually achieving a knowledge and articulation that intriguingly echo Chinese philosophies.