Emily Brontë and the religious imagination
By: Simon Marsden
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2015
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 183
ISBN-13: 9781474239066
Copyright date: 2014
Subjects: Eschatology in literature; Belief and doubt in literature; Religion; Religion in literature; Faith in literature; Criticism and interpretation; Ambiguity in literature
Description: "Through close readings from her literary writings - from Wuthering Heights to her poems, essays and diaries - this book explores Emily Bronte's theological beliefs"--

"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 fulfillment that always lies in a future beyond the scope of the text"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Emily Brontë and the death of God; title: The enchanted world; title: 'If your former words were true' : Christianity and the words of faith; title: Fallen wor(l)ds; title: "A lovelier life from death" : Emily Brontë's apocalypse.