title: MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S GILEAD SEQUENCE: LITERATURE AND THE TRANSLATION OF RELIGIOUS TRADITION
Creators: name: Harsh, Esther
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2021

description: This thesis explores the precarious survival of religious tradition in the modern world through reinvention between generations. It concentrates on novels that deal with religious crisis and conflict, with particular reference to the work of Marilynne Robinson, an American novelist and essayist born 1943, working within the Christian tradition while still reaching a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic. It argues that once the transmission of theology becomes problematic, it is in the human melting pot of psychology that religious problems are re-experienced in ostensibly secular terms. It investigates the possibility of re-translating those psychological and existential concerns into a renewed religious understanding, via the uses of literature. In this, as a cross-disciplinary study in which Robinson’s novels acts as a holding-ground for a mass of competing concerns, the thesis takes its theoretical origins in particular from the work of philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, and psychologists William James and Wilfred Bion. The Introduction outlines this orientation, especially in light of the Victorian realist novelist George Eliot and her 1854 translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity which converted religion into secular terms. Robinson has been called the modern George Eliot, though working within a religious tradition. The thesis then consists of two parts: part 1 concentrating on an examination of the Gilead novels; part 2 offering case histories of reader responses. Part 1 comprises three chapters: Chapter One, The Attempt at Transmission, examines religious tradition from one generation to the next in Robinson’s novels Gilead and Lila in the light of Robinson’s understanding of theologian John Calvin (1509-64) as reinvented through Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), and including Robinson’s interest in Feuerbach (1804-72) and in William James (1842-1910). Chapter Two, The Problem, examines religious tradition in crisis in Robinson’s novel Home. It uses William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) on mental ‘hot spots’ and the work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897-1979) to track moments and places involved in potential changes of reality and crises of belief. Chapter Three, Shakespeare’s Grace, starts from Home’s need for a way forward for blocked and damaged meaning. First it follows Robinson back to her 1977 Masters thesis on Shakespeare’s early history plays. Then it goes forward to her later non-fictional essays on Shakespeare’s late plays, offered as what she calls a ‘natural’ model for why grace might be needed and what the experience of grace might be like outside a formal religious framework. Shakespeare offers for her own fiction a tradition of literary (in lieu of formally religious) language as a holding-ground for meaning. Part 2 explores a variety of modern readers of different backgrounds and persuasions reading Home, using and testing the findings of Part 1 to ask what literature can do to carry meaning previously deemed religious. Chapter Four, Praxis in Groups, examines a live shared-reading group brought together through The Reader, using analytic research tools from the Centre for Research into Literature, Reading and Society to test the development of literary thinking in the challenge of Home. Chapter Five, Praxis in Individual Readers, focuses on individual readers of Home through the use of reader diaries and follow-up interviews. Three case histories of highly experienced readers explore the kind of thinking needed to break through the blocks described in chapter two. Chapter Six, Conclusion, considers how far the language of literature can carry forward in readers’ experience the feeling of meanings previously held within religious tradition, through an analysis of Jack (2020) in recent culmination of the Gilead novels.