Robert Pollok's The Course of Time and Literary Theodicy in the Romantic Age

ISBN-13: 9781032523101 / Twarda / 2023 / 296 str.

Deryl Davis

Opis

This book explores the contexts and reception history of Robert Pollok’s religious epic The Course of Time. Considers the reasons for the poem’s enormous popularity and precipitous decline, focusing on the poem’s combination of evangelical Calvinism and High Romanticism.

Recenzje

The Course of Time was one of the most popular poems in the century after its publication. But in twentieth-century criticism, it almost entirely disappeared. Deryl Davis’s ground-breaking book, the first to focus on the poem, explains why it once mattered – and why it should matter more today.

 

Crawford Gribben, Professor of History, Queen’s University Belfast

 

 

Now almost forgotten, Robert Pollok's The Course of Time (1827) was an enormously influential best seller in its day, sometimes compared to Milton's Paradise Lost. Deryl Davis' new book examines its importance within Scottish Romanticism and the theology and literature of its time and why it was forgotten later in the nineteenth century. Davis' work makes an important contribution to the field of Romanticism and to the religious and literary world of early nineteenth-century Scotland.

 

David Jasper, Emeritus Professor, Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow

 

 

This is a culturally sensitive reassessment of one the big poetic texts in Scotland and well beyond during the early nineteenth century. Discarded and forgotten but now disinterred, Pollok and The Course of Time have much that is worth pondering for a readership interested in literature and theology in the twenty-first century.

 Gerard Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow

Spis treści

Preface

 

Acknowledgements

 

Introduction: Robert Pollok and the Contexts of The Course of Time

 

Summary of The Course of Time

 

Note on Language

 

Chapter 1: Miltonic Theodicy in the Romantic Age

 

Chapter 2: Epic Correspondences: How Pollok Used Milton

 

Chapter 3: Sources of Inspiration:  Byron, John Dick, Edward Irving and old Mortality

 

Chapter 4: The Poem a Sermon: Religion and Moral Portraiture in The Course of Time

 

Chapter 5: Sharpening Weapons at the Forge of Byron: Romanticism and Apocalypticism in The Course of Time

 

Chapter 6: The Rise and Fall of a Christian Epic

 

Conclusion

 

Bibliography

 

Index

O autorze

Deryl Davis is Adjunct Professor of Theology and the Arts at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and a producer with Journey Films, a documentary film company making films on religion and spirituality for public television. He received his Ph.D. in Literature, Theology, and the Arts from the University of Glasgow, Scotland.