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Articles
Literary Academics Are Full of Pooh
Quadrant
(Volume 56, Number 1-2, 2012)
An influential theory once assumed that the old Establishment perpetuated its hegemony, by influencing the way the ancient classics were interpreted, by controlling the semiotics
of its high culture, while teaching English literature—a relatively recent enterprise—was considered more egalitarian: a middle- or working-class reaction
against the old Establishment. If aspects of the theory sound convincing, remember how English departments established themselves throughout the twentieth century—with their attempts at perpetuating their hegemony by controlling their semiotics—in ways that were as bad as anything they once attributed to the old Establishment. As literary academics are influenced by their beliefs, potential students need to know what they're in for and hapless graduates need to process what they've been through. Here are two slim volumes from a retired insider, Emeritus Professor Frederick Crews, who parodies the discipline's methodologies and alludes to the politics driving them; The Pooh Perplex, first published in 1963, parodies earlier trends in literary criticism; Postmodern Pooh, first published in 2001, parodies later trends in literary theory.
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Adapting Patrick White to the Screen
Quadrant
(Volume 55, Number 11, 2011)
Regardless of whether you love or hate him, Patrick White is regarded as a complex author of international stature; he's widely read outside his native Australia, at least in academic settings; he may even be better understood outside Australia. It requires a large vision to adapt his novels to the screen. The task is challenging, but then screen adaptations are challenging. Writing a novel and writing a screenplay are different processes. The author of a novel usually works alone and controls what appears in print. The screenwriter adapting that novel usually works in collaboration and has less say, is less in control of what appears on screen. The collaborators may differ on what they want to
achieve, should achieve, can achieve; each collaborator may understand the novel differently and might not understand White.
In 2011, Fred Schepisi offered us his film adaptation of White's densely-woven and multi-layered The Eye of the Storm (1973).
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Let's Talk About Dying
Quadrant
(Volume 55, Number 10, 2011)
Palliative care has tried to offer a new deal for how we die; however, this new deal represents a struggle, not only against suffering but also against the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of medical treatment. There are many reasons for the juggernaut: doctors often have unrealistic expectations about what they can achieve; the expectations of patients are even more unrealistic; we often avoid talking about dying. Studies find that, although doctors usually tell patients when a cancer isn't curable, most are reluctant to give a specific prognosis even when pressed. More than 40 per cent of oncologists reported offering treatments they believed were unlikely to work. In an era in which the relationship between doctor and patient is increasingly miscast in retail terms—the customer is always right—doctors are especially hesitant to trample on a patient's expectations. They worry far more about being overly pessimistic than they do about being overly optimistic, and talking about dying is fraught.
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The Word Made Wok
Quadrant
(Volume 55, Number 9, 2011)
Several years ago I became a vegan, for ethical reasons; a personal choice—part of my tiny contribution to natural selection and religious belief—which only becomes a public issue when social eating occurs. Meat eaters make more of an issue of my diet than I do. Those who do usually fall back on generalisations; we need to eat meat, poultry, fish, and dairy because we've evolved to or because we've been given biblical warrant to. These generalisations are mindless; neither contributes to the argument for evolution or intelligent design, or to the more challenging argument that they might be the same thing. As we need to keep an open mind about our food, here are two thought-provoking books which argue we are what we eat, and our claim to be civilised depends on how we produce and distribute food. Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2010) and Tom Standage's An Edible History of Humanity (2010) make a nice pair as, when read together, they offer a window to the whole span of human development: pre-historical and historial.
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Greene on Grace
Quadrant
(Volume 55, Number 6, 2011)
It's traditional to draw a line between Greene's Catholic novels, which frame his personal response to the fiction of modernism (and hence the philosophy of modernity) and his later novels with less of a Catholic underpinning. There may be many reasons for this arbitrary division; his novels may have stopped being explicitly Catholic once he realised his status as a theologian–apologist wasn't widely appreciated or easily defended; his Catholic underpinning may have become more implicit than explicit thus more inductive than deductive; his faith may have changed once he came to regard himself as a Catholic agnostic; finally, he may have simply matured as an author over the years. This essay shares my re-assessment of the four Catholic novels, to show how unique each is, and to suggest it's misleading to describe these novels as Manichean, since each is orthodox in its own way.
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The God That Did Not Fail
Quadrant
(Volume 55, Number 5, 2011)
Robert Royal's accessible book The God That Did Not Fail is a take on The God That Failed (1949), a well-known collection of essays in which six famous men, including Arthur Koestler, tell of how they changed their minds about Marxism, one of the gods that failed during the twentieth century, the others being the gods we made of Darwinism, Nietzscheism and Freudianism. Royal's book is more than a take, though. It also complements the intellectual character of the papacy under Benedict XVI. Anyone interested in understanding the historical relationship between faith and reason should read it. Why? because there are lots of cartoons floating about and many people, including those who fancy themselves deep thinkers, only look at the cartoons. Instead of another cartoon, Royal gives us a readable history of Western ideas from a Christian perspective.
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A Cultural History of Terrorism
Quadrant
(Volume 55, Number 4, 2011)
Michael Burleigh has written several acclaimed books; Earthly Powers (2007) and Sacred Causes (2008) explore the politics of religion, and the religion of politics, from the French Revolution to the War on Terror; Blood and Rage (2010) deserves to be widely read as its subject is topical and his treatment magisterial. Burleigh highlights the chameleon-like adaptability of global terrorists embedded throughout the West whose agenda is creating chaos, fomenting sectarian or tribal conflict, and preventing democracy from succeeding. As a Briton he naturally focuses on the European context but Australia is definitely within his horizon. He seems to feel Australia is doing a better job than Britain in addressing the challenge of terrorism as a cultural phenomenon, although perhaps not as good a job as the United States.
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The Papacy and Modernity
Quadrant
(Volume 55, Number 3, 2011)
One of the great political dramas in Western civilisation since the early seventeenth century has been the tension between the papacy and modernity. The strictures of many Enlightenment thinkers on subjects ranging from the nature of reason to the meaning of freedom has resulted in a range of intellectual positions with which the papacy is compelled to engage, often from the standpoint of critic. This isn't simply a function of the violence and upheaval that shook Europe in the wake of the French Revolution. It's also the result of the papacy recognising the political, social, and religious culture of modernity is one in which Catholicism is obliged to live, move, and have its being. Although pronouncements by some nineteenth century popes suggest the Church's position toward the modern world is one of intransigence, the reality is rather different. As Samuel Gregg's short and accessible book The Modern Papacy (2009) shows, nowhere is this more obvious than in the thought of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
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The Maturing Heroine: Frome Jane Austen to Muriel Spark
Quadrant
(Volume 55, Number 1–2, 2011)
When we read different genres of nineteenth and twentieth century novel, we can notice intriguing similarities as well as differences, even though each genre has its own ideology and aesthetic. If we limit ourselves to the novel that focuses on the heroine's journey into adulthood (bildungsroman) it becomes obvious authors represent aspects of the spirit of the age (zeitgeist) in which they live. Put another way, the process through which a heroine matures, and how her maturity is defined and measured, changes. Before the mid-nineteenth century, the heroine was allowed to mature and still keep her religion. After the mid-nineteenth century, the heroine couldn't mature until she either abandoned religion or learned to live on its margins. We can't avoid the question of philosophical or literary influences here. Once we notice a link between Locke and Jane Austen, Hegel and Charlotte Bronte, Feuerbach and George Eliot, Nietzsche and Henry Handel Richardson, or Freud and Iris Murdoch, we need to do some hard thinking. This essay takes a brief look at these conscious and unconscious influences.
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What Makes a Human Being
Quadrant
(Volume 54, Number 12, 2010)
Marilynne Robinson has written three award-winning novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), and Home (2008). Her latest book, Absence of Mind (2010), publishes her 2009 Terry Lectures, a series dedicated to religion in the light of science and philosophy. The sub-title of her book, The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, suggests to potential readers that she questions the assumptions about the mind, and about consciousness, which anti-religionists make, whether in the name of modernism, rationalism, or science. Robinson believes the clutch of certitudes that—when taken together—trivialise and discredit the mind are in need of being looked at again. That's what she does in this book.
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A Study Tour of Israel
Quadrant
(Volume 54, Number 10, 2010)
I went on an interfaith tour of Israel in June 2010, my first but hopefully not my last. During the preceding months, friends and acquaintances expressed concerns absorbed from the grapevine and the media. They warned: It's a war zone! They prophesied: Once the Israelis stamp your passport, you'll never travel anywhere else in the Middle East again! They
lamented: What about the poor Palestinians! The raid on the flotilla heading for Gaza happened two days before I left, which created a certain frisson, which increased on the day I left, as I was travelling to Israel alone via Istanbul, and
Turkey had just recalled its ambassador. But the service and the food in economy on Turkish Airlines were both excellent—much better than anything in economy on Air Anglosphere—and no one seemed fazed by the orthodox Jews bowing and praying during the flight. Good omens, I thought.
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The First Middle East Crisis
Quadrant
(Volume 54, Number 9, 2010)
Martin Goodman's book, Rome and Jerusalem: The clash of ancient civilizations (2008), helps us understand the relationship between the ancient Romans and the ancient Jews. As history from above, it describes the geopolitical relationship between the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the Herodian dynasty and the way the landscape changed after Nero's death in 68 AD. As history from below, we learn something about the people the Herodians tried to govern, including the religious establishment, and nationalistic elements that supported insurrection when they weren't fighting against each other. The Jewish world in which Jesus lived was under Roman rule but didn't feel oppressed by Rome. The revolt that broke out in Jerusalem in 66 AD wasn't sparked by Jewish revulsion against Roman imperialism. It was a reaction against maladministration by an individual low-grade governor. The initial Roman response was little more than a police action, a show of force, but the punitive action planned in 66 AD escalated and became an intensive siege and eventual destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The reasons were political.
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The Woolfs from Above and Below
Quadrant
(Volume 54, Number 7–8, 2010)
Virginia Woolf wasn't translated into the canon because her understanding of the modernist ideology, or her contribution to the modernist aesthetic, was universally evident and accepted. Her canonization had a strong political dimension; it involved factional controls of interpretation; the sexual politics around it meant women like her had to be talked up while men like D.H. Lawrence had to be talked down; and the critical writing around it lacked subtlety. While Virginia's place in the canon is secure, the dust has settled and more measured assessments of her stature are being made. Peter Alexander's Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Literary Partnership (1992) looks at the dynamics of the Woolf's marriage with an emphasis on their literary influence on each other. Alison Light's Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2008) looks at how the Woolf's treated their staff. This is important territory, much of it new. Both studies are more sympathetic than they might otherwise have been and each is balanced in different ways.
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The God of Evolution
Quadrant
(Volume 54, Number 6, 2010)
Charles Darwin believed one could be a theist and an evolutionist. He disliked both ardent theological speculation and the promotion of atheism. In spite of this, he has been adopted as an icon of thinking atheism by those who believe all other explanations of life and purpose and meaning—apart from his theory of evolution by natural selection—belong in the philosophical dustbin. Religious believers who turn to Darwin for succour are unlikely to find him comforting, though, and it's precisely this tension between theism and evolution that makes him such an interesting figure, since he's too subtle and thoughtful to manipulate in favour of one side of the debate. As one academic has pointed out, we need to be careful when trying to pigeonhole the man who wouldn't pigeonhole pigeons. Little has been written about Darwin's religious journey. Nick Spencer's short and accessible book Darwin and God aims to fill that gap.
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A Sense of the Ending
Quadrant
(Volume 54, Number 4, 2010)
"Time is a fact of life," Margaret Atwood admits: "In some ways it is the fact of life. It might even be considered the true hidden subject of all novels." In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode writes about this need of the novelist to explore time as a fact of life. The gist of his thesis is that a story written under the sign of classical metaphysics tends to represent time as linear, and the imagined ending, of the story and of life, is imminent rather than immanent, although immanence is still there in the shadows. Conversely, a story written under the sign of the post-metaphysical critique of classical metaphysics tends to represent time as circular, and the imagined ending, of the story and of life, is immanent rather than imminent, although imminence is still there in the shadows. Atwood's latest novel, The Year of the Flood, which is a companion rather than a sequel to Oryx and Crake, is an example of the balance between immanence and imminence she strives for in her maturity.
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Charles Dickens on Child Abuse
Quadrant
(Volume 54, Number 1–2, 2010)
When considering links between our constructions of child abuse and what Dickens had in mind in Great Expectations, it's necessary to notice the central but easily overlooked role of Jaggers, a prominent London lawyer, whose importance isn't widely understood since he's often in the background. After giving an overview of the novel's most significant symmetry—the parallel stories of Pip and Estella—this article brings Jaggers to the foreground, looks at the boundaries separating his professional and private personas, and how his private beliefs influence his professional actions as Pip's guardian and Estella's controller. Behind all this is the suggestion that Jaggers isn't simply a character in a story. He's a trope in a discourse which moves between literature and philosophy.
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Patrick White on Religion
Spaniel Books
(2010)
Occasionally a fellow Australian asks about my doctorate. On hearing it was about Patrick White's novels, the response is generally a variation of a theme: I've never read him because I don't like him, I've tried reading him and I don't like him, I've read him and I don't like him. The subject usually drops there, or lapses into hearsay about his personality, which is often banal and malicious. Sometimes the subject focuses on his novels but flounders when the enquirer hears my research looked at the religious aspect of his work. "You looked at what?" I looked at the religious aspect of White's work; an aspect he admitted wouldn't be recognised in his lifetime. How does one explain this aspect to the incredulous few? By noticing White objected to the conventions of "Aust. Lit." in his day and embraced conventions which were more broadly Western. How do we explain those conventions to the incredulous few? By noticing White struggled to create "fresh forms out of the rocks and sticks of words", using language the same way an artist uses paint or a composer uses sound. These "fresh forms" were White's attempts to "imagine the real" in his novels, since he believed reality—including the varieties of Western religious experience—is something we filter through our imagination in culturally-determined ways.
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Abraham's Eldest Sons
Spaniel Books
(2010)
Christianity began as a sect that gradually parted from Judaism during the first and second centuries CE; some delay the parting until the third century CE; others believe the parting never needed to happen. Christians have been trying to understand the Jewish context of the New Testament, and the Jewishness of Jesus, for nearly two hundred years. Occasionally their well-meaning attempts have reinforced negative stereotypes of Jews. Things have taken a turn for the better since Christians started letting Jews teach them about Jewishness. This article looks at two examples. The first, Julie Galambush's The Reluctant Parting, comes from a Jewish convert who focuses on the Jewish writers of the New Testament. The second, Amy-Jill Levine's The Misunderstood Jew, comes from an Orthodox Jew who focuses on the Jewishness of Jesus.
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Derek Bickerton on Language
Quadrant
(Volume 53, Number 11, 2009)
Derek Bickerton has two goals in Adam's Tongue: first, to convince us that language is the key to being human; second, to dispose of several confounding factors in the study of language evolution, including its primate-centric bias, its homo-centric bias, and its assumption that language is the target of natural selection. He doesn't believe in intelligent design but neither does he believe language evolution is a juggernaut of precursors and stepping stones. According to Bickerton, Darwin may have challenged the view that humans are special creations of God, but natural selection has never been properly understood. Since Darwin we've adopted the view that humans are special creations of evolution, and evolution has never been properly understood either.
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Derek Bickerton on Creoles
Quadrant
(Volume 53, Number 10, 2009)
Creoles are new languages that spring up, seemingly out of nowhere, whenever people speaking mutually incomprehensible languages are put into contact with one another over long periods. This happened most often when slaves were shipped from Africa to the Caribbean, South America, or islands in the Indian Ocean, where large sugar plantations were
established. It also happened in Hawaii, where waves of indentured labour had immigrated since the late nineteenth century to work on the sugar plantations. This article discusses Derek Bickerton's Bastard Tongues, a book that describes his research into the evolution of creoles, and his admission that creoles aren't really bastard tongues after all. They're the purest expression we know of the human capacity for language.
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Robertson Davies on Self-Discovery
Spaniel Books
(2009)
Robertson Davies writes about the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, fundamental to any journey of self-discovery, and about an invisible immaterial world alongside the visible material world. He believes humans can discover this other world through religion, and many do, but he also believes the arts—visual, performing, fine, and literature—are another path too. He has a proviso about religion and the arts, though, which each novel reworks in its distinctive way. He believes a rupture occurs whenever the western mind focuses on reason, ignores the signposts of allegory, metaphysics, myth, and legend, and avoids the realm of feeling. This article provides an overview of the nine celebrated novels that form Davies' three famous trilogies.
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George Eliot on Scholasticism
Quadrant
(Volume 53, Number 6, 2009)
This article discusses one of English literature's most interpreted novels, George Eliot's Middlemarch, to draw attention to the way Eliot participates in the post-metaphysical critique of classical metaphysics, and in particular to her take on the decline of scholasticism and rise of early modernism. While the critique went on to become mainstream, and dominated the twentieth century, it was still relatively new in the period Eliot wrote, and was certainly new in the 1830s, the period in which the novel is set. Noticing this critique helps the reader understand the relationship between the literature of ideas and the history of ideas.
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How Anglicanism Shaped the Nation
Quadrant
(Volume 53, Number 3, 2009)
Brian Fletcher's latest book, The Place of Anglicanism in Australia isn't a history of Australian Anglicanism since western contact. It's about that church in the lead-up to Federation, and its place in Australia since. Fletcher wants to counter a public image, fostered by an uninformed media, and equally uninformed authors of general and popular books, of a church turning inward, nationally and globally, divorcing itself from society, and becoming ineffectual if not suicidal. He also wants to counter the trend among secular historians, who still dominate the academy, of intentionally marginalising, or unconsciously overlooking, the history and role of religion in Australia.
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Muriel Spark on Evil
Quadrant
(Volume 53, Number 1–2, 2009)
It's been said no author of the twentieth century was more aware of the many forms evil takes than Muriel Spark. This article provides an overview of Spark's expositions of evil in three brilliant, incisive, economical, and immensely funny novels from her prime: The Hothouse by the East River, The Abbess of Crewe, and The Takeover. In each novel, all that's metacritical is rendered hypocritical, in Spark's humorous but deadly serious way, as she reminds us of how evil inhabits our thoughts, words, and deeds.
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William Golding on the Fall
Quadrant
(Volume 52, Number 6, 2008)
This article provides an overview of William Golding's interrogations of the fall in three brilliant and economical novels that succeeded his more popular first novel Lord of the Flies: The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, and Free Fall. In each, Golding represents a fall, physical and metaphysical, located within language, consciousness, free will, or a combination of these. The power of Golding's representations comes from his gift for mimesis rather than diegesis; for his ability to show rather than tell; for the way he embodies rather than narrates.
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On Interpreting Literature
Quadrant
(Volume 52, Number 1–2, 2008)
Partisans in the conflict of interpretation adopt different positions over what literature should be studied. When a discussion about interpretion occurs, it's useful to employ the principles of hermeneutics, but not all literature stands up to the rigour they encourage. They're best employed when approaching literature with hermeneutical intentions. To demonstrate how these principles work, this article applies them to A Passage to India, a novel that's fallen out of favour among academics who take their cues from theorists such as Edward Said.
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Sovereignty and the Sovereign
Spaniel Books
(2008)
For many reasons, constitutional monarchy in Hawaii never had the opportunity to evolve into the Westminster model as we currently know it, since that model is Victorian. From the beginning, the Hawaiian model was more Georgian and therefore, ironically, more American. It wasn't like the Victorian model where the sovereign became an observer with reserved powers; it never had the opportunity to strike the right balance between Bagehot's "dignified" government (the crown) and "efficient" government (the cabinet). Like American presidents, Hawaiian sovereigns were expected to be efficient as well as dignified. They were politically involved and politically vulnerable, and they never had the luxury of separating foreign interests from indigenous interests even when the former were compromising the latter.
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Framing the Human Condition
The Heythrop Journal
(Volume 48, Number 5, 2007)
Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark are often compared but they interrogate classical metaphysics from different perspectives: Murdoch is a secular philosopher while Spark is a religious theologian. Through a reading of The Bell and Robinson, both published in the same year, this article demonstrates how the young Murdoch and Spark did what emerging literary authors of the 1950s were expected to do: frame the human condition and reflect on its existential dilemma.
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Writing and Reading the Canons
Quadrant
(Volume 51, Number 6, 2007)
Canons don't suddenly appear. They evolve. Their evolution influences how we write and read them. There's a chicken-and-egg scenario here. What comes first, a canonical text or its ideology and aesthetic? This article offers four reflections: on the construction of divinity in the sacred canon; on the construction of humanity in the secular canon; on one of Margaret Atwood's most canonical novels, Alias Grace; on the resilience of the sacred and secular canons in an age where some read novels instead of scripture and others go to book club instead of church.
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Four approaches to Patrick White
Quadrant
(Volume 50, Number 12, 2006)
The variety of critical approaches to White represents literature's version of the history wars. The first generation of critics noticed an interrogation being conducted in his novels, and they used evidence from the novels to demonstrate the interrogation. More recently the focus has been on literary theory and opinions about White's personality. This recent focus is more noticeable in Australia, where the legend of a great literary giant has been lost to the myth of a nasty old queen. Critics overseas feel less of a need to cut White down to size.
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Covenants of Wholeness
Adoption & Fostering
(Volume 30, Number 3, 2006)
Throughout history, adoption has reflected the social covenant of the society it serves. For example, adoption served semi-feudal agrarian society in different ways from modern industrialised society. Adoption was once an agreement among extended families and allies, which didn't mandate divorce from birth families and sought to advantage birth and adoptive families alike. This article compares case studies of adoption in the Austen and Kamehameha families, during the period in which Britain and Hawaii made their rapid transitions to constitutional monarchy.
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Jane Austen and the Economy of Salvation
Literature & Theology
(Volume 13, Number 1, 2000)
Because literary criticism in the twentieth century was secular in character, it was difficult for critics to acknowledge the religious dimension of what appeared to be ostensibly secular novels. This reading of Mansfield Park questions several strongly-held beliefs that once prevailed in literary criticism. It suggests the novel presents a systematic discourse, best accessed through Austen's worldview, in which church and state were still an organic unity.
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A Gadamerian Reading of A Passage to India
Literature & Theology
(Volume 12, Number 2, 1998)
Since the early nineteenth century several authors have written within the genres of neoclassicism, romanticism, modernism, and post-modernism, as part of an ongoing interrogation of classical metaphysics, which Habermas calls post-metaphysical thinking. Gadamerian hermeneutics is one useful key to understanding the hermeneutical modes of A Passage to India. This article considers the ways in which both Gadamer and Forster think and write within the post-metaphysical spirit of their age.
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Freedom and Necessity in Interpretation
Literature & Theology
(Volume 9, Number 3, 1995)
The idea of an Australian university was predicated on an assumption that religion was divisive and should be excluded from enlightened institutions. In questioning this exclusion, during a commencement address at Sydney University, Professor Ken Cable pointed to the carved angels holding up the ceiling of the Great Hall. How ironic, he said, there was no angel guarding theology. Until recently this secular ethos, and the apartheid it represents, marginalised the churches to halls of residence at the fringes of Australian universities.
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The Christian Imagination in Patrick White
Christianity & Literature
(Winter 1994)
The religious critic usually mentions White's experience of falling into the mud and realising there is a God. The secular critic usually mentions how a sermon about jelly beans drove him from the church. But White continued to believe in God and until the end of his life he prayed regularly. The Christian imagination is integral to his novels. His late-modernist vision focuses on what contemporary philosophers such as Gadamer and theologians such as Ricoeur also explore: the myths and metaphors that dominate the western imagination.
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The Jewish Imagination in Patrick White
Literature & Theology
(Volume 8, Number 1, 1994)
The Jewish imagination is integral to four of White's novels: The Living and the Dead, Riders in the Chariot, The Solid Mandala, and The Eye of the Storm. White admitted to admiring Judaism and studying it thoroughly. He must have been successful in his characterisation of Judaism, for it has attracted Jewish scholarship in Israel, and praise from Jewish readers, one of whom has commented: "How does this man know it all? He has written what I thought nobody but me and my kind could possibly know and with the understanding of a god".
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