Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination

Description

Readers of Emily Brontë's poetry and of Wuthering Heights have seen in their author, variously, a devout if somewhat unorthodox Christian, a heretic, or a visionary & mystic of the moors&. Rather than seeking to resolve this matter, Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination suggests that such conflicting readings are the product of tensions, conflicts and ambiguities within the texts themselves. Rejecting the idea that a single, coherent set of religious doctrines are to be found in Brontë's work, this book argues that Wuthering Heights and the poems dramatise individual experiences of faith in the context of a world in which such faith is always conflicted, always threatened. Brontë's work dramatises the experience of imaginative faith that is always contested by the presence of other voices, other worldviews. Her characters cling to visionary faith in the face of death and mortality, awaiting and anticipating a final vindication, an eschatological fulfilment that always lies in a future beyond the scope of the text. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements A Note on Texts Chapter 1 Introduction: Emily Brontë and the Death of God The disenchantment of the world Romantic re-enchantment Heretic writing A new heaven and a new earth Chapter 2 The Enchanted World Nature and sacrament A world too much with us The empty symbol Spectres of enchantment Chapter 3 ‘If your Former Words were True’: Christianity and the Words of Faith The thousand creeds ‘Yah knaw whet t’ Scripture ses . . .’ Chapter 4 Fallen Wor(l)ds Naming the problem Bad words Something heterodox Chapter 5 ‘A Lovelier Life from Death’: Emily Brontë’s Apocalypse The sense of an ending Absence and presence An existence of yours beyond you Afterword Notes Bibliography Index